Surveyor General's Dept, ICTA concur for best GIS use

The Surveyor General's Department and ICT Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA), entered into an agreement recently to enable the ICTA to use digital base maps of Sri Lanka produced by the Surveyor General's Department. The agreement was signed by ICTA CEO Reshan Devapura and Surveyor General S. M. W. Fernando.

These maps include the 1:50,000 scale maps of administrative boundaries of the country's provinces, districts, divisions and grama niladhari areas. They also contain other base information such as roads and water resources.

ICTA has already begun developing a centrally hosted Geographic Information System (GIS) based applications suite to use data in various domains to transform them into meaningful information in GIS format. In doing so, ICTA would use the above-mentioned valuable resource from the Surveyor General's Department.

Referring to the facility, ICTA CEO said that these GIS maps and the applications made on top of them, would help the government and citizens in understanding, interpreting and visualising spatialdistribution of data in different domains.

It would also reveal relationships, patterns and trends which are very useful in decision making for both Government and citizens, in an easily understandable visual form.Participating in the occasion of signing the Surveyor contract, Surveyor General of Sri Lanka briefly commented on the history of the Survey Department of Sri Lanka which was set up in 1800.

Fernando said that the Survey Department was always committed to play its pivotal role in the development of providing accurate and reliable spatial data to deliver services for both the Government and citizens of Sri Lanka.

The Survey Department was pleased to join ICTA in making optimum use of ICT to make the services of the department as beneficial as possible and to achieve the national economic and developmental goals, Fernando said.