EDOTORIAL
Nepal GIS Society is celebrating its eleventh anniversary
this year. And this has special significance for
GIS community in Nepal. For one, it serves as an
indicator of as to how far we have come in terms
of ‘temporal scale’ since GIS started attraction
serious attention from policy makers, development
community and academic. In fact the introduction
of GI/RS technology in Nepal preceded years before
the Society was formed. It also forces us to reflect
on as to what extent have we collectively been able
to put the potentialities offered by GIS and host
of other promising spatial technologies to strategic
use aligned with our key developmental imperatives.
Apparently time was not the resource that was in
short supply in this case.
From policy perspective,
a realization seems yet to dawn on policy circles
that GIS/RS technologies are in fact an important
and integral sub-set of information and communication
technologies that have been enjoying considerable
policy attention these days. Unfortunately ICTs
for development debates are usually held within
a framework that excludes potentialities offered
by recent advances in spatial technologies.
One of the
reason that can be attributed in this situation
could be that GIS/RS technologies have evolved,
over the years, to develop as cogent discipline
in their own right and as such are knowingly unknowingly
‘dichotomized’ from large ICT picture and often
times are treated separately. Perhaps rightfully
so, in many situation. But a need for holistic approach
that factors in the potentialities offered by GIS/RS
technologies in policy and strategy framework relating
to ICTs can not however be negated. Given that increasingly
sophisticated ability to manage spatial and locational
attributes of information is one key emergent technological
innovative with far reaching ramifications in ICT
domain, GIS/RS should form an integral part of ICTs
for development debate.
