BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

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Jagan
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Jagan »

I noticed that the Palam IAF technical area is blurred over the rest of the airfield
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by kmkraoind »

I do not bother if ISRO updates India's maps or not. But I would definitely love to see the maps of Pakistan and Tibet plateau updated regularly (at least 1-3 month lag period is okay), so that it became an unexplored territory for Indian amatures to unearth secrets of them (just like US' drone on Paki land). More over I would like AICTE to change the curriculum so every Engineer graduate has to locate at least an unique place in Pakistan or China using Bhuvan, (if they are able to locate more, award more marks), with this we will able to utilize our demographic advantage.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by SSSalvi »

DECIDED ...

BHUVAN??? NO! NO!! NO!!!

Really sorry state of affairs.. shoddy job ... one thing is sure that resolution will not improve , then what is the point in going away from the GOOD OLD.

bye bhuvan .. RIP
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by manish »

SSSalvi wrote:DECIDED ...

BHUVAN??? NO! NO!! NO!!!

Really sorry state of affairs.. shoddy job ... one thing is sure that resolution will not improve , then what is the point in going away from the GOOD OLD.

bye bhuvan .. RIP
???
Why do you say that? Has ISRO stated that?
Indra_P
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Indra_P »

Guys,
I think you don't have to go to bhuvan website to download the maps. check out this article, it explains on how you can directly use Bhuvan without registering.
Last edited by archan on 13 Aug 2009 20:36, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Username changed from infomadness to Indra_P. If you don't like it, please email one of the moderatrors. Read forum rules for details.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by BijuShet »

manish wrote:
SSSalvi wrote:DECIDED ...

BHUVAN??? NO! NO!! NO!!!

Really sorry state of affairs.. shoddy job ... one thing is sure that resolution will not improve , then what is the point in going away from the GOOD OLD.

bye bhuvan .. RIP
???
Why do you say that? Has ISRO stated that?
ISRO has not stated anything. The problem for most first time users is the poor user experience at this portal and when compared with Google earth the resolution is poor too. All this may be due to the fact that this data may not be authentic ISRO data or dated ISRO data. The problem is they made announcements of the launch and we jumped on the bandwagon early. Salvisaar I share your disappointment and hope someone at ISRO is open to suggestions and makes the changes to make this truly a class effort.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by karthik »

Rahul M.. My response is deleted, may i know the reason why?
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by karthik »

I think the babus in ISRO have not heard of the saying "first impression is the best impression." Its sad that many of us had a bad start with Bhuvan and we cant even recommend it to our friends. I thought people at ISRO got their act together compared to other government run organizations, its sad the quality of this website tells a different story!

This is hardly 10mtr resolution and the software is not even up to Google standards as promised by our ISRO officials?
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by nikhil_p »

I think we need to cut them some slack here. This is still a BETA and is bound to have its issues. Also it is not hosted on a server farm the size of google or Msn. So lets give them some time to get their act together......


[rant warning]
P.S: Why are we Indians overtly critical of everything Indian, and the same thing made by a phoren company will be appreciated.
I remember a friend of mine who has used the Mini Rover (old model) for quite some time remarked that the NANO must be a "cramped vehicle with a rickshaw engine"...well he got a piece of my mind... :)

[/rant warning]
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Rishirishi »

I did not manage to acess the site BUT.

Look at the pathetic domain name. A dead give away of incompetance. Not even a hairdresser or a bakery would manage to have such a stupid domain name.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by sohamn »

pandyan wrote: jeez....cut isro some slack and give some time to absorb the feedback and improve. this is not the final version.

on another note...it is good to note that all important areas are blurred...now only thing voldemort needs to do is to scan bhuvan for all blurred areas and pick his targets.
Personally I feel when you launch something with some much fanfare you must match up with some standards. ISRO should understand that its not only desis but chinkis, porkis, unclse, ruskis, etc will also login and check the standard, and they will simply laugh at us. And after all whats the big deal in having a bigger server. This is pathetic, this is just for the heck of it, no real focus.

Anyways, what you are saying is right, the only thing our enemies needs to do is to scan bhuvan and find the sensitive military sites and launch an offensive strike on them.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by shiv »

Well it IS a beta.

Let me post some personal insights on Google earth - useful as it is. Apart from us the educated it is used by and is familiar to almost any college student.

But when you step out of these groups and start looking at "aam aadmi" who has a computer - Google earth is unknown. But every guvrmand town planner, geologist, agricultural dept techie, forestry dept official, police dept guy, town planners, architects etc and they all have to source them via "proper channels" Few of them use Google earth AFAIK and I am not sure that GE's content and resolution are necessarily appropriate. I am certain that Bhuvan will end up being the source of choice for these groups.

Heck the damn beta version has been online for just over 24 hours. No point condemning them immediately. We Indians (IMVHO) have a tendency to rapidly dissociate ourselves from anything Indian which threatens to serve as a source of future embarrassment (to us) just to prove that we are ourselves not that stupid and that we personally represent higher standards. As we have seen time and time again - that attitude often proves wrong and the low class, poor in English, chappal wearing reserved category SDRE does do things - albeit in his own way and not in the polished manner we come to expect based on the kind of inputs to which we have ourselves become inured.

It might be difficult to believe but hardly 10% of Indian have net access or use the net as it can be used. This is not just because of finances - but it is because the content is useless for most apart from ***** or Youtube/music. SDRE content has to be designed and put in and this "Bhuvan" needs to become available in multiple Indian languages.

The Chinese have done a better job - but their job in terms of languages is easier. Bhuvan is totally new, and Indian. Give them a chance. It is OK to be critical but probably not right to be harsh and contemptuous
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Rishi »

log kya sochenge :roll: :((
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by shiv »

sohamn wrote:
Personally I feel when you launch something with some much fanfare
The fanfare is only for the jingos of BR. The column inches and airtime that Bhuvan has got is less than what even a third rate also ran Bollywood type gets (eg Rakhi Sawant) - so there is no point in exaggerating the almost non existent fanfare.


30 seconds ago Google produced 240,000 matches for "Bhuvan" and five times that number for Rakhi Sawant.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by shiv »

Rishi wrote:log kya sochenge :roll: :((
Completely off topic but let me post it here. A recent article I erad linked from BR showed how the Chinese suffer from the deepest syndrome of "Log kya sochenge" but the Cinese are not worried about what Amirkhans or indians may think. Their biggest source of loss of face is what other Chinese will think.

That is why their threatening war rhetoric must be strongly worded. If they say anything less - other Chinese will criticise them as being weak. Notice how China is working itself up into a frenzy to the extent of conducting a 50,000 man exercise on the border in order to show (presumably to other Chinese) that they are "not weak" :lol:

India are just the apajit.

Sorry. OT
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Bade »

Shiv, well said. This whole Bhuvan exercise is largely meant for Indian guvermand users, despite what the media in India or even some ISRO spokesperson may have misspoken on the topic. I am sure they have used something similar within NRSA for long for their internal uses in applications. It is not a commercial venture product by origin. Hence, there will be a lot of jugaad :-) as expected. IT is not their strong point. The web design of their home page is a case in point. But then even content wise the depth is lacking, since no resources are allocated for that purpose when compared with what NASA or NOAA does in budget allocation for outsourced activities along this line.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Katare »

We Indians (IMVHO) have a tendency to rapidly dissociate ourselves from anything Indian which threatens to serve as a source of future embarrassment (to us) just to prove that we are ourselves not that stupid and that we personally represent higher standards.
So true!
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by babbupandey »

some comments:
1. why do they have a watermark at such los-res image? If anyone does indeed want a image, he or she will use Google Earth
2. Bhuvan is NOT (and cannot be) a Google Earth killer
3. they really should have delayed the launch and provided a better product - we are used delays, we are not used to good products from government
4. if they have any 5m resolution image, why don't they upload it. They can provide a note that currently these cities' 5m imagery is provided
blrrrghhh....
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by shiv »

Babbu Panday - the Indian government provides some services to a mass of people who have no services. That is why the government runs the Railways, Akashvani and Indian Airlines. The idea is robbing Peter to pay Paul - which is the fundamental thesis behind all social governance.

We belong to a social stratum of people with the choice of eating cake when there is no bread. I fly to Coimbatore when I could take a train/bus. It is often argued on here that the private sector could take over. But if the government handed over the lucrative parts of its businesses to private parties, they would not be left with the profits needed to run the non profit social side of their services.

For a person like me, the elite, India government is invariably "low class/ janata" level. I belong to a higher stratum and neither seek a government job, nor do I patronize government services. The India government caters to someone else - not me. Bhuvan too will cater to someone else. Village Panchayat computers will come with Bhuvan pre-installed for locals to admire/use images of their local area.

We will continue to use Google earth which is designed for sophisticates like me.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by pankajs »

IMHO the disappointment is because of the following
1. Advertised (by the media) as Google Earth killer
2. Usual babu way of doing stuff i.e. launch a half baked product

We should remember the following.
1. Still a BETA.
2. Budget would be miniscule.
3. Tried to implement a lot of functionality at the 1st go (Google Earth + wikimapia + extras)
4. You still have alternatives till this matures.

btw, it does have some interesting features over and above what others provide. If they can get it right, ISRO will have added another feather.

JMT
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by krishnan »

Well its their first project of this kind, also they might have been asked to keep security in mind while doing this.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Jagan »

The redeeming part of Bhuvan are the info that makes it an India-specific GIS - district boundaries, village statistics, census info etc which maybe of immense use for many govermund departments and applications. ofcourse we are jpeg jingos and will ogle googleearth high res images of airbases and cantonements. but there will be a lot more people out there who will use it for other social benefit purposes.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by abhiti »

Jagan wrote:The redeeming part of Bhuvan are the info that makes it an India-specific GIS - district boundaries, village statistics, census info etc which maybe of immense use for many govermund departments and applications. ofcourse we are jpeg jingos and will ogle googleearth high res images of airbases and cantonements. but there will be a lot more people out there who will use it for other social benefit purposes.
Let us also not forget the use of GIS product for security planning. It will be foolish for India security forces (read military) to depend on Google Earth. You need to have an alternative, I am so happy someone is thinking. It will mature and be useful in time.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by pankajs »

abhiti wrote: Let us also not forget the use of GIS product for security planning. It will be foolish for India security forces (read military) to depend on Google Earth. You need to have an alternative, I am so happy someone is thinking. It will mature and be useful in time.
I would assume that the security apparatus will have their toy different from this. However, the civil sector would definitely benefit, especially those that would not be able to approach the National Remote Sensing agency for the lack of resources.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by SSSalvi »

The reason that I will not go to Bhuvan is:

1. Why would one go to a GIS database? To see features.

In GE I am able to see the coconut tree in the corner of my house in Hyderabad. In Bhuvan I see a white blurred spot as my house ... forget of the tree.

http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc60 ... house1.jpg


2. In GE you see the names of the places and depending on what is the resolution the names appear and disappear so that there is no clutter. In Bhuvan I have seen only the big city name. That's all.

3. I have personally seen the Tanks in the 26Jan parade in Delhi in real time as one of the 1st images from a satellite that I was involved in. I am sure that that sat has acquired data over my house in a few passes over hyderabad and surely I will be able to see the tree mentioned in point 1 above .. but I am sure that it will not be used in Bhuvan because of 'security' laws of some 14th century or 16th century or some thing like that.

So you can't expect a better image although such images are available.

Then why Bhuvan?
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by skaranam »

For One, i am happy with Bhuvan. This is a huge step for ISRO for the applications of this
service is tremendous (both civilian and military).

The only thing which worries me is the plug-in. It is developed by a company based in the US. I am sure military and other sensitive applications have a different way to access the application.

It is a BETA. All s/w engineers know what BETA really means. I am happy at the deployment.
There are many kinks in the website and application...but these will be ironed out over the time.

For now, we have an alternate to GE when it comes to India (though not perfect).
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Gagan »

I don't think that is Bhuvan we are looking at. Terra explorer gets launched when we go to the Bhuvan site, I've seen terra explorer a few years back, but gave up on it because the images were so old. My house was built over 8 years back, the image still shows an empty green field where it was.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by karthik »

shiv wrote:
sohamn wrote:
Personally I feel when you launch something with some much fanfare
The fanfare is only for the jingos of BR. The column inches and airtime that Bhuvan has got is less than what even a third rate also ran Bollywood type gets (eg Rakhi Sawant) - so there is no point in exaggerating the almost non existent fanfare.


30 seconds ago Google produced 240,000 matches for "Bhuvan" and five times that number for Rakhi Sawant.
I am not sure about this Googles hits, i once searched for Deviled Eggs and i 666,000 hits! I repeated the search a few days later and it was still 666!! Strangely enough Deviled eggs has only 124,000 hits now! Some one is playing with the Hits there and i get the feeling it could be the same guy who writes our fortune on Orkut! lol.. (if u know what i mean!)

However even if the Bhuvan hits are half truth its really tragic because ISRO could have lost those early adapters and gadget freeks. IMO ISRO should have got its act together before it launched the site!
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by KrishG »

However even if the Bhuvan hits are half truth its really tragic because ISRO could have lost those early adapters and gadget freeks. IMO ISRO should have got its act together before it launched the site!
Have a little patience. The Beta version was launched to test the user interface and popularity among users. The full version will be up in a few days time.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by shiv »

karthik wrote: However even if the Bhuvan hits are half truth its really tragic because ISRO could have lost those early adapters and gadget freeks. IMO ISRO should have got its act together before it launched the site!

If a thing is good people will come back and use it even if they rejected it earlier. We need to wait and see what happens. I personally would like to see fewer whining comparisons of a 3 day old beta version with a global scale, well established janata satellite pic server (Google earth)
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Neela »

shiv wrote:
karthik wrote: However even if the Bhuvan hits are half truth its really tragic because ISRO could have lost those early adapters and gadget freeks. IMO ISRO should have got its act together before it launched the site!

If a thing is good people will come back and use it even if they rejected it earlier. We need to wait and see what happens. I personally would like to see fewer whining comparisons of a 3 day old beta version with a global scale, well established janata satellite pic server (Google earth)
Blame it all on that single article which had "Google Earth killer".

Lets wait and see how things evolve over time. Of course,if you give NRSA an unlimited budget and a ~300 strong workforce, things would be different. But reality is, they managed to get a BETA out and a working system.
And there is no pressure on NRSA and thier survival is not dependent on this. It will take time.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by shiv »

Well - for the skeptics here is an image of a river in the Arunachal Pradesh border with China.

Check the image resolution.

Image
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by mahan »

can somebody post more of bhuvan vs google pictures

as i am not able to log on bhuvan site due to heavy traffic
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Singha »

business standard:

Devangshu Datta: Google Earth's desi version
ISRO's new beta Bhuvan suffers heavily vis-a-vis Google Earth and associated programs like
Devangshu Datta / New Delhi August 15, 2009, 0:32 IST


Software is one industry where it is feasible to release experimental products in the hopes that user-feedback will help iron out bugs. This is what an open beta release seeks to do. “Beta” carries large built-in disclaimers.

The beta user-community sees bugs and instability as the price of indulging curiosity. Ideally, beta-user feedback leads to upgrades that eventually make programs more stable, useful and interesting for aam users.

If however, the beta is directly comparable to a popular, freely available product, then the standard of comparisons is unfortunately, much higher. ISRO’s new beta Bhuvan that launched on Wednesday suffers heavily vis-a-vis Google Earth and associated programs like Wikimapia. The image-mapping software from ISRO is clunky. It has many potentially useful and impressive features but it is being delivered in a condition that makes even hardened beta-users sweat.

The political imperative to releasing Bhuvan on or around I-Day (on Dr Sarabhai’s 90th birthday actually) may have been strong. It was behind schedule — there’s been a buzz about it since November 2008 at least. Nevertheless, it may have been better to wait or to release a “closed” beta without exposing Bhuvan as it stands to public view.

Bhuvan promises to do a lot more than G-Earth for India-specific users. It offers quicker data refreshment (the satellite pictures will be newer). It offers better street-by-street (indeed house-by-house) coverage with resolutions that will eventually be significantly better.

It also offers a load of useful metadata ranging across climate, weather, demographics, and the historical values of above. These could empower an endless range of commercially useful apps as well as research tools. It allows easy measuring and scaling and one-click snapshot of maps. This is brilliant. Once the next version incorporates Chandrayaan-data, including shots of the dark side of the moon, the geek community will have collective orgasms.
:oops:
But let me list some of the frustrations. Bhuvan requires an 10.7Mb download from the ISRO site. The site has not been mirrored and it has been down near-continuously due to high traffic since the launch. That was three days ago, and 72 hours is long enough for even bureaucracies to take corrective action. The GoI has both the technological ability and the bandwidth. The Election Commission and the Railways, for instance, handle humongous traffic.

Anyway let’s assume a user gets there when the site is working, goes through the tedious registration (I’m the Phd who lives in Maradona-Nagar), downloads and completes set-up. Bhuvan can only be run off the site, post-login. This means permanent traffic jams. You will get kicked off regularly. The user-interface has good, deep menus but lacks much in the way of help though this is common to most beta-releases.

What is more, Bhuvan can only be used off Windows platforms, through an Internet Explorer browser with DirectX and MS.Net installed. It is not a “full-screen” app since it sits inside IE. It can only be run off broadband connections that are at least 756Kbps in speed.

All this ignores India’s realities in terms of user-preferences and of broadband penetration. Very few home-users have connections anywhere near that fast (default “broadband” is 256Kbps). India’s beta-users include a thriving Linux and Mac community while browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc are popular. DirectX is also not a safe environment. If ISRO does get hacked, DirectX will help to spread the pain.

Net-net, Bhuvan is a technically brilliant product with many innovative features. But it could fail to win widespread adoption due to the inability to consider the user perspective. It is possible to address all these issues. That’s what beta is supposedly about. Let’s hope that this is corrected in the stable release, whenever that is
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by a_kumar »

Neela wrote: Lets wait and see how things evolve over time. Of course,if you give NRSA an unlimited budget and a ~300 strong workforce, things would be different. But reality is, they managed to get a BETA out and a working system.
And there is no pressure on NRSA and thier survival is not dependent on this. It will take time.
A sensible thing for NRSA to do is to partner with a capable private company and gradually go behind the curtain (Its a difficult thing knowing how much each of us want the name ourselves). But GoI should realize that NRSA is not in the buisness of thinking about customer experience and satisfying the end-user, they are in the business of making a valuable database.

I am desperately hoping that GoI will use this opportunity to sow seeds for potentially big Indian software companies. They could give some startups a chance to take it forward.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Singha »

indeed - designing UI's and useable customer facing sw is not their main job. they can focus on the back end and work out some APIs which a couple of indian cos can take forward and rapidly develop good UI based viewer and associated tools. if they provide the raw data for snapshot download and a open API , lots of people including graduate students in colleges could do term projects to pick and process and present the data for various uses.
kinda like the android and iphone SDK :arrow:

we have lakhs of hungry, creative and desperate students in colleges who'd love to be
given such opportunities.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by sohamn »

I tried accessing the site atleast some 10 times from my home and office and everytime I couldn't. If indian gov thinks that Bhuvan should have a MAX user limit of 20 in a country of a billion people then they are grossly wrong. Had it been a private company launching a website they wouldn't be so lax. Just because Govt. of india lauched a website I can't be less critical. An application like Bhuvan should atleast have a larger server. The company I work with have a server with 8 boxes and each having 8 processors(each 2 cores), 256 GB of memory in each box, another identical twin for backup and all these just for one application to be used by a max 1500 users. And this is not the best of what is available. With an app like Bhuvan they should have something atleast similar to cater thousands of concurrent users.
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by Gagan »

Old news, DDM at its dorkiest best. Goes on to show how our reporters are scientifically and technically challenged.
Bhuvan: India's upcoming web map announced, misreported
Thursday, November 06, 2008 (23:44 UTC)

[Update 2009-08-12: Bhuvan has been launched, and is accessible here.]

Bhuvan, which means Earth in Hindu Sanskrit, will be India's home-grown (3D?) web-based satellite imaging and mapping app when it goes live in March 2009, according to Indian media.

What it will do depends on how much faith you have in this media.

According to the Times of India it will let you "count the lions in Gir or fishermen find concentration of fish in the sea." The Times also has nonsensical stuff like:
If Google Earth shows details upto 200 metres distance and Wikimapia upto 50 metres, Bhuvan will show images upto 10 metres, which means you can easily see details upto a three floor high building and also add information.
That's ludicrous, of course, as it is the resolution of the camera that matters. Also, Wikimapia uses Google's imagery, but that's something that has been misreported before.

The Times also has what I sincerely hope is misquote by Indian Space Research Organisation chairman Dr G Madhavan Nair:
"[Bhuvan] will be able to give you an image from only 10 meters away", he said to the excited gathering.
More believably, imagery will be updated every year, and will be of the Indian sub-continent only. The Times also reports that you'll have the option of viewing imagery from different dates, which would indeed be a cool feature.

ExpressIndia reports, meanwhile, has what is very likely another misquote:
The ISRO Chairman said with this service they will have mapping of the entire earth, both in terms of the upper land surface and the exotic minerals down below.

That would be nice, if only it were likely to be true.

Joking aside, DNA India has a properly reported article. Salient points:
The data gathered through Bhuvan will be provided to different government agencies for urban planning, traffic management, crop planning, education and forest planning. The data will be available free to users, but very high resolution and customised precision data will be given to agencies at a cost, [ISRO Chairman] Madhavan added. “Integrated with application-specific Spatial Decision Support tools, the application will open up a new era of collaborative mapping in the country,” he said
.

But I think this is unintentionally hilarious:
Technical Transfer Industrial Department head YP Rana said, “In scientific lingo, this is an oven-fresh concept, we are working on the details.
Quite possibly Rana was joking, and the reporter didn't get the joke.

If Bhuvan turns into a web mapping resource that manages to show satellite images of all of India at a constant, say, 2.5 meter resolution, that would certainly be a worthy addition to existing web tools, complementing Google Earth's 15m basemap with 1m DigitalGlobe imagery for urban areas. It will be especially interesting to find those parts of Bhuvan that are censored, as those are the ones we'll all have to go check out in Google Earth for Indian military secrets.
SSridhar
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by SSridhar »

Bouquets & Brickbats for BHUVAN
Excerpts
Just 50 hours into its launch, over 68,000 users have registered. The general user, who logged in to check out “India’s answer to Google Earth” — a phrase coined by the media — was more than disappointed to find an unresponsive and slow website, multiple plug-ins (to be downloaded separately) and a clunky user interface that is punctuated with hiccups. Those who managed to log in were further peeved because resolutions offered on the maps do not exactly allow you to view your street, or spot your rooftop. Being embedded in Internet Explorer also limits image size compared to the full screen experience standalone products offer.
. . . . the larger purpose of a portal like Bhuvan is forgotten. Bhuvan, as it stands, makes available freely an immense body of information that is of great academic and research value.

For instance, it offers drought-related information for the past three years (will soon be updated to 19 years) from across the country. Metadata offered includes climate, demographics and historical values. Unlike Google Earth or Wikimapia, Bhuvan’s maps are multilayered — each layer is packed with information ranging from mapping the Golden Quadrilateral to land-use data. Bhuvan’s USP is that it is India-specific and is more useful to society than any other application. Also, given that three IRS satellites are being used for imaging, the data will be updated annually (a major grouse with GE).

Bhuvan cannot compete with other products in terms of resolution — most terrain is mapped at a resolution of 5.8 metres compared to 2.5 metres offered by others. Though resolutions up to 2.5 metres are available, the current policy does not permit making it public for security reasons (sources say this policy is likely to be reconsidered soon). However, when it comes to smaller towns or districts, one must note that GE images are of 30-40 metres resolution, while Bhuvan maps consistently at 5.8 metres resolution.
The Internet community, which has long moved to free browsers such as Firefox, Opera and now Google Chrome, is miffed at being forced to use Internet Explorer. Further, it is not usable on any GNU/Linux operating system. “We are in our Beta version and all those issues will be ironed out very soon,” promises Mr. Jayaraman.

Bhuvan is being improvised by the day.
shiv
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Re: BHUVAN .... India's own browsable image gallery

Post by shiv »

Folks - check out all the menu options on Bhuvan. Some interesting stuff there.
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