International Tidbits
Bahrain has added five new geospatial slides to its national geographic database per General Informatics Organisation Geospatial IT Director Dr Khalid Abdulrahman AlHidan said. They include the geoid, land heights, and provide health and demographic details and join more than 25 other layers. It’s interesting to me that the article on this announcement refers to the layers as maps (very understandable) but then fails to note what the geoid is.
FahrasQatar is an interactive online business directory developed by ictQATAR. The company ran a business plan competition
to select the first company to be part of ictQATAR’s new Digital Content Incubation Centre, which aims to help grow a sustainable digital content industry in Qatar. The winning plan included GIS:
In their winning business case, Mohamed al-Sada, Reem, Fahad and Mohamed al-Kuwari outlined an ambitious strategy for the ‘Qatari Yellow Pages’ that would focus on better integrating a Geographic Information System (GIS) into the site, improving its ‘search engine marketing’, enhanced security and better functionality of the site across multiple platforms, such as mobile phones.
Pune’s Great Software Lab (GS Lab) along with the National Institute of Virology (NIV), Pune is modeling the spread of Japanese Encephalitis (JE) in Gorakhpur district of Uttar Pradesh. The portal and the map-based tool are designed to help researchers visualize data. An NGO, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), pushed the project forward.
