Wikipedia and Tanzanian Geography

 Points of view, Review  No Responses »
Aug 202012
 

For those of you who do not know what Wikipedia is, the short version is that Wikipedia is “[..] a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model.” (Source: Wikipedia). This article is about relevant GIS/geography articles in Wikipedia related to Tanzania.

A version of this article was posted back in August 2007. Since then the body of literature on Tanzania in Wikipediahas continuously been growing. Both the English and the Swahili articles. The number of Swahili articles as of today number 24.126. The articles cover a wide number of themes, many of the not directly related to Tanzania.

Continue reading »

Historical aerial photos/imagery in Tanzania

 Points of view, Review, Spatial data  1 Response »
Aug 012012
 

In 2009 Brian Kuns with Stocholm University wrote a memo titled “Towards an Inventory of Historical Aerial Photos of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda”. The memo represents a preliminary overview of archival resources containing historical aerial photographs of East Africa.

I have taken a look at the memo and in this article I will try to focus on any Tanzanian sources of data in most part using Kuns memo. I will also throw in some reflections of my own on historical aerial photographs and what lies ahead of us. Continue reading »

Development cooperation GIS (devcogis)

 Announcements, Review  No Responses »
May 132012
 

Ragnvald Larsen has written an article on his blog about development cooperation GIS. In his article he says:

–Looking at the term development cooperation GIS I will point to related work on a policy level and exemplify the development cooperation GIS by highlighting current projects where it could find its use and more. I will also briefly present parts of my own work and discuss challenges in development cooperation GIS. (twitter: #devcogis)

Read on here: www.mindland.com

Web mapping and crowdsourcing: tracking Parthenium

 Review, Uncategorized  1 Response »
May 022012
 

Parthenium hysterophorus imageInvasive plants in Tanzania are becoming a big problem … in a ‘potentially collapse the economy’ sort of way. For one, Parthenium is spreading rapidly here and in the region, and Ethiopia has seen a loss of more than 25% of its rangelands in the past decade. The Conservation Resource Centre has an article on this.

Monitoring the spread of Parthenium and other plants is tough – there are few national resources to do this, and Tanzania’s a big place, but there are a lot of people who are interested in the issue.

We’re trialling Crowdmap (the excellent Ushahidi application) to try to use reports from  just about anyone to see where it is and how it is spreading. See the live map below to get an idea. Go to partheniumafrica.crowdmap.com to try it out. Continue reading »

Geoserver for the masses

 Review  No Responses »
Oct 302010
 
As a geographer I once in a while end up being extremely positively surprised by innovations, both commercial and from open source communities. Google Earth, which most of us know, has opened the world of GIS in a completely new way for the general public. Geoserver is another door opener.

Although Geoserver will not find the same audience as Google Earth it helps by leveling the field when it comes to providing spatial data by the use of servers. Where one earlier would need detailed knowledge (and funding) to set up ESRI products, one may now do the same investing only a couple of hours of work. Within hours you could be able to present spatial data within your own organization, or even externally using a web server.

This short article is a small review of Geoserver and some of its capabilities.
Web Map Services and Web Feature Services are tools for presenting spatial data both for internal and external consumption. In this article I will use an example from my workplace to show how a protected areas data set can be presented using Geoserver 2.0.2. Version 2.1 is just around the corner.

Download the article here:

Update:

%d bloggers like this:
Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami