GIS in local authorities

For whatever reason the GIS magazine Geo was sent to my workplace, with the current issue headlined to be around GIS in local administration. The main article on the topic is GIS in Modern Local Authorities, though mostly on the applications of GIS inside the administration, while normal citizen like me will only notice those parts of the GIS which is made public on the websites.

Now though I check websites of local authorities in Thailand a lot, I rarely see anything of GIS on the websites - if there are maps at all, it is often hand-drawn sketch like maps. Only few have Google Maps included on their website, and the cases where they have a more detailed Google map are so rare, the one I found last year is still the only such elaborate one.

The websites where I found GIS more often are the websites of the provincial administrations. As usual, the province I check most is Surat Thani, and on their website is a public GIS based on ESRI's arcGIS. Yet the most useful part of that GIS for my purposes so far are the boundaries of the municipalities and subdistricts of the province.

However, as a scientist by education, the most interesting article in the magazine is the article See the ground beneath your feet about the OpenGeoScience project - mapping the geological layers in the UK.