09 September 2019, Bangkok, Thailand – UNOSAT delivered a training on geospatial big data applications for sustainable development to enhance the capacity of the Member States of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) together with regional partners, from 5 to 9 August 2019, at the Space Krenovation Park (SKP) in Chonburi province of Thailand. The training course intended to provide participants with a theoretical understanding of geospatial big data and its analysis and applications for problem identification, assessment and decision support towards achieving SDGs.
The increasing value of big data analytics to geographic information system (GIS) is stimulating, because it can lead to a substantial lessening of computation time and manual data processing when analyzing huge amounts of data on cloud-based platforms. With the rapid advancement of sensor and communication technologies, new sources of geospatial big data are emerging exponentially (i.e. satellites, drones, vehicles, geosocial networking services, mobile devices, and cameras). Multi-temporal earth observation data and crowdsourced geospatial data are especially invaluable in identifying the depletion of natural resources, diagnosing the underlying causes and devising informed plans for sustainable development. Geospatial information technology (GIT) thus will enable the ASEAN Member States to use big data for policy framing and decision-making, but also to address the pressing need of strengthening institutional capacity for implementing SDGs.
Over the course duration, participants learned different operational applications of GIS and Remote Sensing starting from basic introduction, analysis for visualization and mapping, to the use of cloud-based platforms for big data analysis such as Google Earth Engine and Climate Engine that are useful tools for real-time monitoring of fire, smoke and haze. The web scraping method to utilize big data in social media for disaster monitoring was also introduced.
