About Karnataka Geographic Information System (K-GIS)

Karnataka state has pioneered in several e-Governance initiatives in the country which have got national acclaim and have been followed by various other states. Going forward towards next era, Government of Karnataka has launched the Karnataka Geographic Information System (K-GIS) as a flag ship program of the state which is visualized as a technology to be a common platform that will consolidate and provide a future path that ensures availability of updated “GIS ready data” of specified standard that will go a long way in enhancing interoperability, integration, enabling the departments towards g-governance consistency and economy of effort. The concept is foresight of the Government of Karnataka and the Karnataka Jnana Ayoga (KJA), to set in process of consultation with the key departments in the government on the vision for a state GIS and for assessing needs through a broad consultation process. K-GIS is envisioned to be a major support to high quality state GOVERNENCE by embedding GIS in different aspects of governance – planning and implementation at national/state/local levels; bringing GIS support in decision making; enabling a sound process of monitoring development and 'identifying gaps in development'; make GIS data available at all levels-that helps bringing accountability and responsibility in state’s governance.

K-GIS will help reduce the duplication of GIS efforts in the state, remove redundancy and help create an authoritative GIS data available to all agencies, enterprises and citizens. K-GIS would have layers that would be organized from RS images and survey data/maps. Such data shall be integrated/fused with MIS/available data records of various departments. GIS based applications and decision support system for planning and applications shall be developed for each GOK departments as DSS. Citizen-centric GIS applications are also visualized as part of K-GIS. Karnataka State Remote Sensing Applications Center(KSRSAC) shall be implementing the program of K-GIS in the state. KSRSAC is the state’s nodal agency for RS and GIS activities and over the years KSRSAC has generated large amount of GIS assets on project basis, apart from building expert human resources in GIS within the Centre. KSRSAC has ensured that satellite images and GIS have been used from late 1980 onwards and Karnataka was one of the first states to establish a separate Centre for Remote Sensing (RS) and GIS. Availability of multi skilled expertise and the experience of handling variety of geospatial data and application development of the center has is the key for being the implementation partner for this mission mode project. Under this programme, all departments in the State are stakeholders and are mandated to share the Geospatial data and MIS to K-GIS and develop GIS based governance solutions.

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Objective

The prime objective of K-GIS is to establish the state needs for a robust information and GIS based decision support systems and also focus to ensure continued availability of GIS ready data assets and applications for decision support, in a way easily accessible across the departments, citizens, private enterprises, institutions etc. The KGIS is expected to enable the policy makers, departments and public to make effective decision making process for planning and implementation of various developmental activities. KGIS shall help empowering citizens with GIS data for various information and development needs. It shall act as a single gateway integrated platform to access, acquire, process, store, distribute and improve the utilization of seamless geospatial information of the state through advanced tools for GIS analysis through simpler web and mobile interfaces system with an executive dashboard and other business workflows.

KGIS capacity building is a sustained effort for training and orientation of user/professionals for government and enterprise in GIS. The major component of capacity building is in-house and departmental training program, promote and outreach activity in spatial technology.

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Descision Support System

K-GIS Decision Support System (DSS) applications, a suite of GIS applications is designed and optimized to provide secure robust, reliable, responsive and scalable map services and applications to develop and built a robust multi-tier dynamic client-server system architecture. KGIS-DSS shall have specific configurations that can be used in performing geospatial data analysis. The K-GIS DSS will be based on a single window of GIS interface system - providing requested GIS data and relevant applications through closely integrated, yet loosely coupled multiple web-based decision support systems and web GIS services.

The K-GIS DSS will be dove-tailed/integrated with the K-GIS DSS (which are more suited for central ministries/departments). The advantage is that the same GIS database would power the K-GIS applications and specific DSS for states – this brings tremendous synergy and commonality of data and enhancing the value of decisions, governance, citizen participation etc (akin to the use of national census in the state’s planning as complement to any additional census done specifically at the state level for details/ aspects not covered by the national census).

Consulting with GOK departments, inputs have been obtained on specific GIS data and GIS Applications for Governance, as part of their departmental process. Such inputs have been received from some departments of GOK and the GIS Applications defined (these can be modified and additional GIS DSS for governance will be added.

The other factors of multi-tier architecture are work flow performance, backward compatibility, scalability and interoperability to provide 24X7 access, high availability and high level of security considered to both data (being crucial) and system.

Benefits

  • K-GIS will bring immense benefit to the state of Karnataka. It will support state-level governance and state level citizen participation but also in building a knowledge network based on use of GIS tools
  • K-GIS shall help in planning on a GIS DSS applications suite supporting state Planning, Plan Monitoring functions and Public Assets monitoring and investment assessment using GIS
  • It shall create one “common” state-wide GIS database that would be used by one and all
  • It is expected to remove redundancy and repetitive GIS information generation leading to inconsistency
  • Ready availability, accessibility and data-service of a GIS-Asset for the whole state as a collection of standardized, inter-operable, seamless and maintained GIS datasets.
  • Make GIS data available at all levels – that helps bringing accountability and responsibility in Governance all over the state.
  • Enhance efficiency of governance, decision-making, planning and development actions on the Karnataka GIS DSS Applications engine that would enable GOK departments, citizens etc to embed GIS applications as part of their decision- and work-processes
  • A major support to state, district and locale GOVERNANCE by embedding GIS in all aspects of planning and development at state/district/ panchayath levels
  • Citizen services by giving access to state-wide maps/image/geospatial information
  • Geo-enabling e- governance and public services
  • Enabling a “crowd-sourced” interactive process of citizen involvement in providing feed-back/inputs/data as a virtual geographic ingest
  • Brining transparency and geo-spatial information support in decision-making
  • Enabling sound process of monitoring and identifying “gaps in development
  • Accelerated development of a number of Enterprise-GIS solutions being undertaken by private enterprises and help align these to state development
  • To make the state in a leading role in national/international GIS arena and enabling a larger role-playing by the state in this critical technology arena in the world
  • Also to make Karnataka GIS to be major contributor towards National GIS

Monitoring and Guidance

K-GIS is guided by 3 committee’s consisting of technical experts, senior administrative and financial heads of department.

  • Empowered Committee under the Chairmanship of Chief Secretary, GoK to lay down the policy guidelines and to suggest activities for implementation of K-GIS
  • Executive Committee under the Chairmanship of Additional Principal Secretary, Department of Personnel and Administrative Reforms (e-Governance), Gok to take administrative and financial decisions related to execution of the mission
  • K-GIS Technical Committee under the guidance of a technical team from various domains headed by an geospatial expert for defining procedures, suggest detailed action plans and recommend guidelines for implementing the project
  • All activities of K-GIS are executed and monitored by the Mission Director with K-GIS core team

Major elements of K-GIS

  • K-GIS Asset / Data, a seamless, state-wide GIS-Ready dataset of various maps/image data layers that are standardized, updated and configured to meet the GIS data and application needs of government, citizens and enterprises.
  • K-GIS Portal, a single gateway access to K-GIS Asset and K-GIS DSS Applications - with specialised Metadata service, GIS Applications service, data ingest service, data sharing service, publishing service etc.
  • K-GIS DSS Applications, a suite of GIS applications for decision- and work-processes of different departments; GIS applications for public services and citizens and also hosting/publishing enterprise GIS solutions.
  • K-GIS Capacity building, a sustained effort for training and orientation of users/professionals from government and enterprise in GIS and for positioning an integrated programme of education and research in GIS.
  • K-GIS Infrastructure – Necessary IT Hardware and Software infrastructure for development, hosting and continuous maintenance including network, storage and other communication systems / accessories.
  • K-GIS Policy Management and Practices, through a constant policy-definition and review that promotes GIS usage in the state and creates the environment for success of GIS activity in the state.