GIS Services

Developing GIS for Decision Support

A computer software technology, Geospatial Information System combines database management and statistical analysis with image processing and computerized mapping to create a powerful decision support tool. GIS offers a variety of analysis and modeling tools to help a decision maker examine, analyze and interpret the relevant data, for a variety of scenarios. What follows is a set of scenarios where GIS performs as a decision support tool.

Scenario # 001
An urban development agency is facing problems associated with planning, managing and ensuring environmental quality resulting from an enormously rapid growth of population. GIS facilitates the use of remotely sensed reliable, timely and periodic data in conjunction with the associated demographic details in evolving a variety of scenarios for ameliorating the situation.

Scenario # 002
A rural and renewable energy development agency wishes to prepare a list of villages from its 20 community development blocks, for installation of renewable energy harnessing devices. GIS facilitates the use of relevant village wise details such as average sunny days in a year, livestock population, total households household size, per capita income, average winter temperature, average summer temperature, population engaged in primary, sector and tertiary sectors of economic activity, distance from nearest all weather road, etcetera in evolving a set of alternative lists to suit the available budget.

Scenario # 003
A hydroelectric power corporation wishes to assess the impact of locating a dam in particular area. GIS facilitates the delineation of the area that would be inundated as a consequence, the area that would be flooded when the water from the dam is released, which in turn would facilitate assessing the loss of flora, fauna, human settlements and their economic activities.

Scenario # 004
A disaster management authority wishes to identify the existing as well as potential landslide zones in a hilly area. GIS facilitates the use of imagery depicting existing landslide areas as well as the hill slopes, which have been enormously deforested in the recent time via spectral classification and other methods for deriving a map of potentially hazardous areas.

Scenario # 005
The directorate of agriculture wishes to ensure an optimum crop yield. GIS facilitates the use of variables such as slope, soil quality, nutrients in conjunction with crop sample data over several hectares of farmland in identifying areas of high and low quality yield for evolving scenarios for improving production.

Scenario # 006
A provincial government wishes to evolve a poverty alleviation program. GIS facilitates the use of the socioeconomic details for the community development blocks, subdivisions, districts in developing alternative socioeconomic scenarios for evolving an appropriate poverty alleviation program.

Scenario # 007
A tourism development corporation wishes to develop a ski resort. GIS facilitates the use of physical characteristics of slope, aspect, and elevation of a site to produce a physical suitability map. GIS also facilitates combining the physical suitability map with market potential data to produce a site suitability map.

Scenario # 008
A wildlife manager wishes to know the different population levels of tiger in a forest. GIS facilitates the use location wise details of sighting tigers in evolving a wildlife density map.

Scenario # 009
A multinational bank wishes to determine the ideal location for its new branch. GIS facilitates the use of details of competitive banks in a particular location in determining the suitability of the proposed new branch.

Scenario # 010
A political party wishes to evolve a strategy for winning an election. GIS facilitates the use of constituency wise demographic details in conjunction with details on socioeconomic development over a given period of time in evolving the appropriate strategy.

Scenario # 011
A public service agency wishes to redefine its coverage areas. GIS facilitates mapping and analyzing areas based on the phone numbers of their clients or constituents.

The scenarios presented here are brief descriptions. They are intended to give an idea of some of the wide variety of application of GIS as a decision support tool.