Slashgeo

GIS Development links to a story about the Indian military to be a part of GLONASS. From the DNA India article: "In a major step forward in its ambition to use space applications for defence, India is entering into a partnership with Russia to be a part of Glonass. After America's Global Positioning System (GPS), Glonass is currently the only other satellite-based navigation system and it would be available for Indian military applications, sources said. India is also a partner in the European Union's Galileo system, which would be ready by 2008. But since Galileo would only be for civilian use, joining Glonass becomes significant."

Directions Mag reports the state of global navigation satellite systems with a focus on India. From the article: "While many western countries are already in the saturation stage, India is still in the introductory stage. India has its own technology to launch its own satellites but it has not made an effort sufficient to create awareness about the use of GPS in day-to-day activities. [...] New satellite navigation systems - the European Union’s Galileo, Russia’s GLONASS, Japan’s Quasi-Zenith Satellite System, and China’s Twinstar - are going up. The speakers talked about the use of GNSS and of various augmentation systems in use and those which are being planned." There's also 6 India-related previous stories linked below.

All Points Blog links to an article named "Opportunities and Challenges in Indian GIS Segment". From the article: "Having said that, there are several major challenges that the industry still faces: 1. GIS and remote sensing application software require high end computers with high end graphics cards etc, which at the moment are comparatively expensive in India. But this problem will cease to persist gradually as prices of hardware keep going down. 2. GIS awareness and education levels are still low in India. It has yet to proliferate fully in the formal technical education space (graduate degree programs, diploma's, etc), even though many universities and colleges have started teaching GIS in PG programs. 3. The last but the biggest constraint is the easy availability of spatial data. In India, most of the organizations that have adopted GIS are still spending a lot of money and time on building data. One of the reasons attributable to this is the disparity between the various systems from which the data has to move from one form to another before the final desired output is available. The second reason is very tight government control on spatial data acquisition and high cost of satellite and aerial data." I also included below a whole bunch of India-related geospatial news.

Here's a few recent news regarding GALILEO and GLONASS GPS systems. I copied in related stories below many items of interest regarding the two programs. Recent geoblogs entries include Vector One discussing GALILEO: "Today Christopher Booker of the Telegraph newspaper in the UK sums up the project in his column, “The costs of Galileo have already taken off so wildly (and it is already six years behind schedule), that we may well hand over much more than £1.7 billion to pay for our 17 per cent share in this white elephant (somehow two thirds of the EU’s members have managed to get out of paying anything at all).”" Google's Ed Parsons chimes in. Meanwhile, GLONASS seems in much better shape, as indicated by this other V1 entry and the news of the successful new GLONASS satellite launch.

Location reports on India's plans for a satellite navigation system. From the article: "India plans to build a constellation of seven geo-stationary satellites at a cost of Rs 1,600 crore to meet the navigational system requirements in cars, trains and aircraft. "Design (of the satellites) is more or less complete. We are in the process of building the first proto model," Secretary in the Department of Space G Madhavan Nair said."

A few recent geoblogs entry discussed the status of webmapping in India. There's Dan Karran's entry on Google's approach to crowdsourcing map data in India, which is on the same topic as the GEB's entry about local knowledge power for India mapping and APB links to an article about tackling urban problems with GIS in India. From the first link: "I was curious about this after the State of the Map conference but it seems last week Michael Jones, the CTO of Google Earth, shone a little light on the subject of Google's crowdsourced maps of India (along with other geo things from Google) at the Cambridge Conference. I've transcribed the part of the podcast that really interested me (see below), describing what they've built up in terms of geodata for 50 Indian cities and how they are doing it with a pilot project to deploy a 'care package' to countries to let the citizens map it for themselves based on local knowledge and Google's excellent aerial imagery sources." See also numerous Indian-related stories below.

GeoCarta discuss and links to articles related to Vladimir Putin hoping GLONASS will have a bright future. From this article: " “In order users chose GLONASS, the system should operate flawlessly, better than GPS (the global positioning system). Cheaper and with a better quality,” he said at a meeting with government members on Monday. “I hope that the government will pay much attention to the creation of the GLONASS system,” the president said. He added that he watched the progress of the project. “We have the right to count on known, healthy economic patriotism of our users, first of all of the state, but I proceed from the assumption that we shall work on market terms in this sector of the economy, and users will be able to chose a quality service,” Putin stressed." See numerous related stories below, including the collaboration between India and Russia.

Slashdot tells us India successfully launched four satellites yesterday. From the article: "Of the four satellites, the ISRO's Cartosat-2 is for mapping purposes and its SRE will be a forerunner to the ISRO mastering the re-entry, recoverable and re-usable launch vehicle technologies." This is related to the previous announcement of 12 new indian satellites in 4 years.

the SM-GIS blog links to a Space Review article on Europe's Galileo and China's Compass. From the article: "For the Chinese, Galileo is no longer a partner, but instead more of a competitor. They extracted as much as they reasonably could have out of their relationship with the Europeans over this and now have decided to strike out on their own. [...] China was invited into Galileo partly as a way to snub the US and partly because the Europeans seem to believe that the more “international” a project is the better chance it has of not being canceled."