All government organisations – central, state or local–require geographic information to manage land, coordinate disaster relief, plan/manage infrastructure facilities and solve environmental and social issues. Private companies too require geographic information for facilities management, resource location and marketing. Computers have made geographical information of the world and its inhabitants more accessible and useful to governments, businesses and communities to take critical decisions. Maps that were once confined to paper have increasingly migrated to digital form. Geographic information systems (GIS) allow users to integrate, analyse and manage information about locations in ways that was never possible before. Improvements in software, increased storage capacity and plummeting hardware costs put geographic information systems and associated technologies on desktops everywhere.

Geographic data collection is a multi-billion business. But many-a-time, data gets duplicated as organisations and companies tend to collect data over the same piece of land for their projects/plans either due to ignorance about the data availability, inaccessibility of data or difficulties in sharing the available data. Data created for one application may not be easily translated for use into another application. The problems are not just technical but the lack of culture in organisations/institutions to work together and share information/data. Central or state government organisations, creators of geographical data, may not be willing to share the same with each other, with local governments, private companies or general public. If sharing data among organisations were easier, millions could be saved annually and governments and businesses could become more efficient and effective.

While organisations like Survey of India and Geological Survey of India have public access to geographic information as a mandate, this has for long been limited to only a small part of the actual data generated. Though the scenario is slightly encouraging after the liberalisation of policy guiding maps in the country, current approaches suffer from invisibility. In an ocean of unrelated and poorly organised digital flotsam, the occasional site offering valuable geographic data to the public cannot easily be found.