Business
Improved Maps Available Online
It now contains more information
You can now access the map of your country on the Internet and use it for your own purpose, that is if you are from one of the eight Pacific member countries of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States to benefit from the latest project undertaken by the Suva-based South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC).
Funded by the European Union, the project is aimed at improving decision making in three important geographical sectors in the Pacific: aggregates for construction; hazard mitigation and risk assessment; and water resources, supply and sanitation.
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According to SOPAC's IT expert Franck Martin, the Euro 7 million three-year project started last year with the Fiji and Tonga maps already available online.
The team is currently working on the Kiribati map with the remaining countries being Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
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"For Fiji, this is the first e-government application available to the broad community. The website (for Fiji: http://map.mrd.gov.fj) allows the exchange of geographical information between all stakeholders. It is easy for any organisation to upload over the web and publish their map via the built-in layer manager," says Martin.
"Moreover, this application is Open Source, meaning that many organisations in Fiji will be able to deploy it to help share information." Information available on the server includes digital elevation models, road networks and high resolution satellite imagery, to name a few.
If you are a layman, you could find the site interesting in that you can locate your house, zoom in and know the specification of the building. You can also know if your house is sitting on an earthquake prone area and then decide whether or not you want to risk staying on if it is indeed earthquake prone. Tourists may also use it if they've lost their way or looking for a place to go‹the imagery is very detailed.
Those who would have extensive use of the map would be the experts‹mining companies, engineers, cable companies, the water supply department if it wants to lay new pipes or map existing infrastructure.
This new project has made reliance on paper maps a thing of the past. Says Fiji's Director of Mines Baskha Rao: "A lot of government departments like us use information which are mapped. This initiative is far better because the maps are now available in electronic format. Instead of going all the way to the Mineral Resources Department to get a map, which could take several days to process, this one is instantly available online with a lot of information which you can use for your own purposes. I think it is very convenient."
Martin adds that the applications are wide for the new mapserver, ranging from land management, infrastructure planning, disaster management, and more. "We are going to do the same for other countries and we are in the process of collecting all relevant information," he says.
While the project is specifically aimed to assist decision-makers in the region, it has far reaching implications. "The provision of a web-based mapserver in each country will enable the distribution of information and analysis to a much larger section of the population, and ultimately in the rural areas.
"It is anticipated that the service will be useful to a broad spectrum of the community and that some of these materials will be used in classrooms throughout the Pacific so that schools can better understand the interaction between the environment, social and economic aspects of development," Martin says.
