Preamble

Geo-ICT (location based services, spatial decision making and geo-computations) interlinked with Sensor Networks (SN) and Grid Computing (GC) technologies promises to be an interesting combination for generating host of useful information for various applications such as agriculture, disaster management/mitigation, transportation, security, early warning systems, real time weather and environmental information systems, etc. Realizing the importance of this integrated system, an initiative was taken up under the Indo-Japan Bilateral Programme under the DST-JST Strategic Cooperation Programme on Multidisciplinary ICT (http://www.stic-dst.org/DSTJSTCOP2007.doc) to develop a real-time Decision Support System (DSS), which will christened as ‘GeoSense’ (http://www.csre.iitb.ac.in/geosense), to assist the rural stakeholders for improving the rural livelihood, environmental sustenance/security and agriculture productivity which are attracting importance recently due to global climate change. This collaboration will be carried out between IIT-Bombay of India and NARO-NARC of Japan by utilizing and integrating their experiences and advantages in the targeted field. Geo-ICT model GramyaVikas (http://www.csre.iitb.ac.in/geosense/gramyavikas.pdf), Motes-based AgriSens (http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/spann/) of IIT Bombay and Wi-Fi based FieldServer (http://model.job.affrc.go.jp/FieldServer/FieldServerEn/default.htm) of NARC/NARO, Tsukuba will be integrated in the GeoSense.