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‘Geoson’s rebirth highlights global GIS day’

By J. K. Obatala            
20 November 2016   |   2:10 am
The Geoinformation Society of Nigeria (GEOSON), which had been moribund for the past ten years, was resuscitated Wednesday, in Abuja, to mark the 17th Global GIS Day celebration.     
DG NASRDA, Seidu Mohammed

DG NASRDA, Seidu Mohammed

The Geoinformation Society of Nigeria (GEOSON), which had been moribund for the past ten years, was resuscitated Wednesday, in Abuja, to mark the 17th Global GIS Day celebration.
    
Delegates to a conference at the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA), established a Caretaker Committee and a Committee of Elders, to carry the process forward.
     
Director of Strategic Space Applications, Dr. Ahmad Shaba, in NASRDA, which is coordinating the revival effort, said Caretakers could now organize a General Conference, to elect new officers.

    
“The idea,” Shaba told The Guardian, “is to revisit and reinvigorate GEOSON. We’ll meet again within six months. After eight months, we hope to have executive officers in place.”    
    
Wikipedia describes GIS (Geographical Information Systems) as any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyzes, shares and displays geographical information.
    
It is based largely on geoinformatics, which, in the 1960s, crystallized from disciplines within geography—the science that studies Earth’s surface and human interaction with it.
    
According to a GIS Day Internet posting, the global initiative is for people to learn about geography and the uses of GIS, stressing that it is “a grassroots effort and open to everyone to participate.”
   
Director of the Centre for Space Research and Applications at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Professor Joseph Akinyede, said that was why the planning session was held on GIS Day.
   
“There could hardly be a more apt occasion than this global celebration,” he declared, “to breathe new life into GEOSON, whose purpose is to bring all GIS practitioners together under one umbrella.”
     
Akinyede, who is also a member of the Committee of Elders, explained that Geoinformation cuts across all areas of sustainable development, adding: “It’s all about resources…their location, their utilization…information about resources on land…as well as in the oceans, in the atmosphere and even in outer space…
   
“From this information system,” he continued, “will evolve a geospatial data infrastructure: I.e., diverse types of data in a single system, so that you have a kind of one-stop shop.” 
    
In his keynote address, Professor Ademola Omojola, Head of the Geography Department at the University of Lagos, Akoka, decried what he called “the food is ready economy.”
    
“This outmoded and unsystematic approach to economic activity, he said, has diverted decision- and policy-makers from modern thinking about the country’s resource base,” he added.
    
Omojala lamented that everybody’s talking about Nigeria’s natural resources, “yet we’re now suffering poverty…because we don’t have an order to our resources. There is no priority. Everything is chaotic.”

Director General, NASRDA, Professor S.O. Mohammed, called GEOSON a “rallying platform for all Geoinformation experts” and expressed the hope that “this second coming will be sustained.”
 

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