Forum to Highlight GIS Solutions for Businesses

KINGSTON — The Ministry of Housing, Environment, Water and Local Government (MHEWLG) will be staging a Geographic Information System (GIS) Business Executive Forum today (November 9), at the Knutsford Court Hotel in New Kingston.

Under the theme: ‘GIS: Generating Innovative Solutions,” the forum seeks to expose members of the business community to GIS, and how they can benefit from its numerous customised solutions.

"We hope to enlighten more persons about GIS and all its capabilities. Also, we want to expose persons about how entities have been utilising the various software and what the possibilities are,” said Senior GlS Manager at the Ministry, Simone Lloyd.

She told JIS News that the event will include technical presentations, and booth exhibitions and workshops, to showcase GIS software applications such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and TUMP, which are widely used to find places, services and events.

“We are encouraging persons to get involved and to actually reap the benefits of using these software because we are in a technological age. Persons, who have Internet access, can easily download these GIS software using a smart phone or a computer anywhere in the world,” Miss Lloyd said.

Portfolio Minister, Hon. Dr. Horace Chang, will address the opening of the forum, while Dean of Public Health Technology at the University of Technology (UTech), Professor Winston Davidson, will deliver the main address.

Among the participating organisations are: GeoTech Visions Enterprise Limited, Mona Informatix, Spatial Innovision Limited, Globe Insurance, National Works Agency (NWA), and the Ministry of Health.

The forum is supported by the Land Information Council of Jamaica(LICJ), the National Land Agency (NLA), Spatial Innovision Limited, and the Mona Geo-Informatics Institute.

Persons, who wish to participate, can contact the Spatial Data Management Division within the Ministry at 876-927-0441, or LICJ at www.licj.org.jm.

GIS is the merging of cartography, statistical analysis, and database technology and is designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographically referenced data.

In a general sense, the term describes any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyses, shares and displays geographic  information than can be used to inform decision making. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries (user-created searches), analyse spatial information, edit data, maps, and present the results of all these operations.

By Jeneva Gordon, JIS PRO