Brasília – The Brazilian Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management launched a tool today (8th) that will help the government and private enterprises plan and manage their investment and actions more efficiently. The Spatial Data Infrastructure (Inde) portal aggregates geospatial data produced by various Brazilian organizations – such as the outline of a road used for transport of goods, the construction of a hydroelectric plant that will supply power to a given area, or the establishment of an industrial hub.
"We are not going to remain restricted to already existing structures. The portal will also include the complete plans for ongoing projects, provided that the data has been submitted to us," informed the chairman of the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Eduardo Pereira Nunes.
The IBGE is in charge of collecting and cataloguing information, ensuring its compatibility and making it available on the portal (www.inde.gov.br). "Safer investment will be made possible based on the analysis of information from the portal," explains the chairman.
The data will be based on maps of the Brazilian territory, including cartographic information and satellite images. It is possible to access information on drainage basins, woods, forests, farming areas, and the location of schools and healthcare units.
According to the secretary of Strategic Planning and Investment at the ministry, Afonso Almeida, the portal will help the government manage public policies. "We used to always be bothered by how blindly we used to implement public policies in Brazil, when it came to matters of space. This would be much easier in a smaller country."
Several Brazilian organizations had already been producing information of this sort, but the data would end up stuck due to lack of integration among different organizations. “The portal is going to centralize all of that information. It is important to note that what we are launching today is not a prototype. It is a portal with a set of tools that are already working, and which will help us to avoid the duplicity of actions planned by public organizations or private enterprises by means of metadata,” said the director of Geosciences of the IBGE, Luiz Paulo Souto Fortes.
According to him, a series of data is already available on the portal, supplied by the Ministry of Environment, the Mineral Resources Research Company (CPRM), and the IBGE itself. The portal of Spatial Data Infrastructure (Inde) is free of charge and is also available on the Website of the– www.ibge.gov.br.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
