The objective of the workshop is to discuss and develop an overarching framework for generating and making available geospatial data for use by different users at various levels for good goverance and for promoting sustained economic development of the state of Jammu and kashmir. It is hoped that the Workshop shall provide a platform to all the stakeholders in the state and beyond to interact and demonstrate the use of geospatial information for planning and decision making for good goverance at different political and administrative levels. The success acheived at the use of spatial Planning for G-Goverance at the national and international level need to be emulated for promotion of good goverance at all levels in the state of Jammu and Kashmir and thus, inter alia, push forward the development process in the state. However, it requires generation of geospatial data in various sectors and appropriate analytical tools need to be adopted to develop Decision Support Systems (DSS) for good goverance in these sectors. Though, it is quite heartening that the government has recently formed Jammu and Kashmir E-goverance Agency(JakeGA), to develop a roadmap for building capacity of the state in E-goverance but to ensure that E-Goverance translates into G-Goverance at the community level, it is impressive to take necessary steps for the development of Spatial Data Infrastructure in various sectors in the state.

There are difficulties and challenges that need to be tackled as we move from data-centric to a service-centric and finally to goverance-centric perspective in SDI development. University of Kashmir, together with the Industry and the government,is geared up to meet the challenges in making Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) operational in practical terms in the state.