This was a article I cut out from the Philippine Daily Inquirer in 19 Feb 1995. A few months after this article was published, I visited the Port of Singapore's Geographic Information System Office. As the GIS Consultant for Infoman, I was tasked to evaluate the CARIS and Silicon Graphics installation used to produce Electronic Navigation Charts (ENC). Eventually, NAMRIA bought similar HW and SW as well other IT equipment to modernize its mapping capability.

Then, our GIS is at par with that of Singapore and Malaysia. I have observed that while distributing Silicon Graphics GIS workstation in the Philippines and Brunei and attending SGI's training and business meetings at Science Park in Singapore and KL in Malaysia.

Now, GIS has not moved forward as far as our neighboring countries have reached. One particular reason could be the lack of leadership from the government to pump prime acquisition of new digital maps to build GIS solutions. Vietnam, whose infrastructures were devastated by wars with the French and American are well ahead in the deployment of GIS. Their leaders are well trained. I met the head of the GIS/survey department in Korea in November 2006 and he has a PhD from Bulgarian University.

Tomorrow, we will realize we missed a lot of opportunities and probably some of our sovereign territory due to antiquated GIS and Geomatics infrastructures. But we must act. Now.

Labels: ENC, GIS

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