Bhuvan
Indian web-based GIS tool for geospatial data.
Bhuvan is a web-based utility developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation that allows users to explore geographic content, primarily within Indian boundaries, in four regional languages. It is notable for enabling the Indian government to host public geospatial data as information layers for visualization and public consumption, including thematic maps related to disasters, agriculture, water resources, and land cover.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- ISRO
- Released
- August 12, 2009
- Latest release version
- Beta
- Latest release date
- 12 August 2015
- Operating system
- cross platform
- Language
- Hindi
- English
- Tamil
- Telugu
- Genre
- Geographic information system, Virtual globe
- Licence
- Freeware; Public domain
Facts from the source article.
Overview
ISRO launched the beta version of Bhuvan on August 12, 2009. It offers detailed imagery of Indian locations, with spatial resolutions up to 1 metre for 177 cities and 2.5m resolution for the rest of the country. Military installations are excluded from the images due to security concerns. The National Remote Sensing Agency contributed to its development, using data from Resourcesat-1, Cartosat-1, and Cartosat-2.
Improvement
Users have experienced difficulties with Bhuvan, including inaccessibility or slow performance due to limited bandwidth and servers. Subsequent updates made the portal faster and more responsive. The NSRC created BhuvanLite for a faster experience and launched Bhuvan Wiki, a web application for sharing and contributing knowledge among users. Bhuvan does not require login for map visualization; registration is needed only to download satellite data up to 25m resolution LISS-III data and products such as NDVI, OHC datasets, and the Cartosat Digital Elevation Model. To address plug-in restrictions and platform dependency for 3D visualization, Bhuvan adopted a WebGL-based open-source virtual globe requiring only WebGL-enabled browsers. A more stable version has been released with fewer reported problems, and a discussion forum was started for users experiencing difficulties.
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