Financial Times

Vehicle thieves beware, your days are numbered
By Quintus Perera
Geoinformatics (Pvt) Ltd, a Sri Lankan company, is working on a technique – ready by next year -- to dislodge the engine of the motor vehicle that is stolen. They would also formulate a technology to track vehicles by pin-pointing the exact place where the vehicle is, whether it is stolen or otherwise.

This was revealed at the occasion of the official launch of Geoinformatics website www.eagleneth.com - Internet Map for locations information that took place at the Galadari Hotel last week. Geoinformatics is a professional enterprise specializing in the collection and dissemination of geographical information, including remotely sensed geo information.

Sudarman Siripala, Managing Director, Geoinformatics said that they commenced operations in 1990 with a group of professional surveyors and was incorporated in 1994. Since then projects funded by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, JICA and European Union and projects from corporate sector were handled.

In 1999 Geoinformatics signed an agreement with the National Data Centre of National Remote Sensing Agency of the Department of Space, India as their service provider in Sri Lanka. He said that in 2001 when Digital Globe Inc, USA launched the “Quick Bird” Satellite, Geoinformatics became their representative in Sri Lanka.

They would be providing remote sensing data for agriculture and oceanography and have successfully completed the photographing-from-the-air of the proposed Colombo-Kandy Expressway route. They have also completed the insertion of all the locations of buildings in the city of Colombo as a prelude to insertion of all the locations of buildings in Sri Lanka.

Jagath Jayasekera, CEO, Geoinformatics said that as a result of the launching of the Website anyone who would log on to this website would find it very easy to find any location in Colombo. He said that this would be the surest and time saving way of locating buildings as other instruments used for this purpose would not be that reliable as for example around 40 percent of the Telephone Directory information was false.

He said that they have linked the websites of other companies and anyone else also could provide their websites so that all of them could be inter-linked. They would be involved in tourist hotel, schools, hospitals and other government institutions mapping. Geoinformatics is also trying to tie up with Internet cafes.

He said that their next programme would be providing a system to track vehicles – vehicle detection on-line and on-time coupled with dislodging the engine of the vehicle could reduce vehicle thefts.

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