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The International Water Management Institute's Data and Knowledge Storehouse Pathway (IWMIDSP) was launched in June 2004 meeting the need identified in the IWMI 2002-2004 MTP Project 1: "Improved tools for assessment, accounting, planning and use of water resources for agriculture and food production." Since then to now, IWMIDSP (http://www.iwmidsp.org) has evolved as a pathfinder in providing over 3 terabyte of state-of-art value added remote sensing and GIS (RS/GIS) data and products of high scientific quality that are made available through online access for the global benchmark river basins, Nations, regions, and the entire World.
The IWMIDSP has about 5 new registrations every day and currently (as on February 16, 2006) reaching a total permanent registrations of 1964 from over 50 Countries. Over last 1-year there has been, on an average, a constant stream of at least 2000 visitors from 70 Countries every month. To date, about 1.4 million hits have been recorded, 270,000 pages visited, and on an average 130 gigabytes of data downloaded every month. All data in IWMIDSP have accompanied by Meta data at international standard (FGDC). Our data users include students from leading Universities of the World, researchers from UN organizations, USGS, NASA, and National Institutions. Further the IWMIDSP link has been provided by over 50 web portals. The site has also been profiled by the World Health Organization, UN Human Settlement Program (UN HABITAT), and UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).
The IWMIDSP generated maps were widely used to understand and inform Tsunami damage and rehabilitation immediately after Tsunami by the coordinating National Office (CNO)-a Sri Lankan Presidential initiative (http://www.iwmidsp.org/iwmi/info/tsunami.asp). IWMIDSP hosted and disseminated real time Tsunami Response maps of Sri Lanka (an effort of IWMI and MapAction UK) to the world. These maps were not only popular with the non-Governmental Organizations (NGO's) working in Sri Lanka, but were printed in a book (FAO, 2005) by FAO (www.fao.org/tsunami/environment/maps.html). The maps were also used in the "Geographic Information Systems" chapter in an Australian school book (Easton et al., 2006) of which 40,000 copies were printed.
The IWMIDSP data is instrumental in production of the first satellite sensor based Global Map of Irrigated Areas (GMIA; http://www.iwmigiam.org) and the South West Asia drought monitoring project (dms.iwmi.org).
The IWMIDSP has been hailed as the "best UN or similar GIS sites I have seen" by Keith Forbes of UN Economic Affairs Officer. Dr. John G. Lyon, Director of USEPA Las Vegas writes: "I just cant say enough positive things about the site....what is very striking to me, is...this is probably the very first time that all these great sources of data and information and decision support systems have made all their great work available free of charge and in formats that all can understand....it is truly impressive...." The outcome is that IWMIDSP has established itself as a unique one of its kind Global Public Good (GPG) data and knowledge spatial data gateway.
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