ISRO, MapmyIndia join hands to take on Google Maps/Earth
(Sourced from PTI)
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and location and navigation technology solutions provider MapmyIndia announced an initiative to partner together to offer India's best, and fully indigenous, mapping portal and geospatial services. "It combines the power of MapmyIndia's digital maps and technologies with ISRO's catalog of satellite imagery and earth observation data," according to Rohan Verma, MapmyIndia's CEO and Executive Director.
Verma termed it a path-breaking milestone in India's journey toward Aatmanirbhar Bharat, wherein Indian users would not be dependent on foreign organizations for maps, navigation, and geospatial services, and leverage made-in-India solutions instead. "You don't need Google Maps/Earth any longer," Verma said in LinkedIn article.
According to Bengaluru-based ISRO, the Department of Space (DoS) -ISRO comes under it - has joined hands with MapmyIndia to combine their geospatial expertise and build holistic solutions by leveraging their geoportals. DoS entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Thursday with geospatial technology company CE Info Systems Private Limited, which owns MapmyIndia.
"Under the partnership, the combined geospatial expertise of the DoS and CE Info Systems would be leveraged through their respective Geoportals," according to ISRO. "The collaboration will enable them to jointly identify and build holistic geospatial solutions utilizing the earth observation datasets, NavIC, Web Services, and APIs (application programming interface) available in MapmyIndia, Bhuvan, VEDAS, and MOSDAC geoportals," the space agency added.
VEDAS (Visualisation of Earth observation Data and Archival System) is an online geo-processing platform using optical, microwave, thermal, and hyperspectral EO data covering applications particularly meant for academia, research, and problem-solving. MOSDAC (Meteorological and Oceanographic Satellite Data Archival Centre) is a data repository for all the meteorological missions of ISRO and deals with weather-related information, oceanography, and tropical water cycles.
Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) called NavIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation) is India's own navigation system, developed by ISRO. Bhuvan is the national geoportal developed and hosted by ISRO comprising geospatial data, services, and tools for analysis.
Verma said that there are many reasons why Indians are better off with an indigenous solution for maps and geospatial services. "MapmyIndia, being a responsible, local, Indian company, ensures that its maps reflect the true sovereignty of the country, depicting India's borders as per Government of India, and hosts its maps in India," he said.
"MapmyIndia's maps cover all 7.5 lakh villages, 7500+ cities at street and building-level, connected by 63 lakh kilometers of road network pan India and within cities, in total providing maps for more than three crore places across India," the company statement said.
"Through the combined partnership with ISRO, MapmyIndias end-user maps, apps and services will now integrate with ISROs huge catalog of satellite imagery and earth observation data," MapmyIndia said in a statement. "It would be a much better, more detailed and comprehensive, as well as privacy-centric, hyper-local and indigenous mapping solution for Indians, compared to foreign map apps and solutions," it added.
Verma said that foreign mapping solutions come with a lot of hidden costs. "For example, foreign search engines and companies claim to offer "free" maps, but in reality, they make money by targeting the same users with advertising based on invading user privacy and auctioning those users' private location and movement data," he claimed. "This should be very alarming to all citizens," he said.
"MapmyIndia has an ethical point of view against advertising-led business models of such companies, and hence, does not have an advertising business model. By using MapmyIndia maps and applications instead of the foreign map apps, users can better protect their privacy," Verma said.
