Abstract
Digital Asia is an initiative to provide people and communities with easy access to geo-spatial information over the Internet through open sharing of GIS and Remote Sensing Data among all the countries of Asia. Digital Asia will form the Digital Asia Network (DAN) to bring together all participating people and agencies, and to provide a place where they can obtain useful information for developing their applications and demonstration systems. As a three-year activity, DAN would support participants' efforts to link these Web-based GIS systems to demonstrate the usefulness of data availability and data sharing for society. The main objectives of Digital Asia are (1) to develop a mechanism for data sharing, so that partners can participate easily, (2) to provide guidelines for developing applications and demonstration systems, (3) to help any agencies, through sharing of technical knowledge and training, who would like to open their data, (4) to stimulate development of demonstration systems which will be the basis of a future operational system, and (5) to share experience and "lessons learned" through development of demonstration systems. To promote this DAN concept, NASDA agreed to support a DAN preparation meeting in cooperation with the DAN secretariat at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), and the preparation of a three-year implementation plan for DAN. This paper describes the overview of Digital Asia Network concept and the implementation plan.
