Our family owns a house in the northern parts of Norway. The family spends around eight weeks there a year fishing, mowing the lawn, hiking, meeting family, eating good food and more. I have also spent a considerable part of my spare time sitting in Trondheim mapping the island using OpenStreetMap.
Many of us have seen those hilarious maps showing us “The world according to americans”, “The world according to Hungary” etc… You can even buy the maps at sites like Alphadesigner or Zazzle. Great fun and a friendly reminder about bias – in maps and life in general.
For almost ten years now I have been working in the areas environment and development cooperation with geographical Information Systems (GIS) as my foremost tool. My recent postings and tweets about the theme begs for a proper term and a definition. I have chosen development cooperation GIS. For my tweets I will follow up with the twitter hashtag #devcogis.
A Digital Elevation Models (DEM) is a data set containing information about a terrains surface. In its most basic form it is a collection of geographical positions with associated elevation information. With this information it is possible to make visualizations or calculations which again can be used to understand how objects on the surface can interact.
Open Source software as part of development cooperation is not a matter of principle. Choosing software in development cooperation projects is about finding good software tools to help you do the job.
Web map services are not straightforward any more. Some are based on complex queries to database like Oracle, MSSQL and PostGIS. This makes it possible for the services to provide highly specialized data views to their clients. Sometimes this is done by having the web map service accepting or forwarding non-standardized parameters. It’s beautiful and confusing at the same time.
Field database front end
Throughout the last four years I have been traveling to several countries where part of my job has been to get an overview of available spatial data. To do this I needed a tool to make a list of data and associated metadata. So I started playing around with a MS Access database. At a recent stay in Timor Leste I used it for collecting and structuring data.
The 6th of March as part of the Norwegian Petroleum Assistance Program together with DNMA I contributed to a workshop to be held at the Arbiru Hotel in Dili, Timor Leste. The intended outcome was to contribute to a process for establishing better handling of environmental data. The workshop was opened by his Excellency Sr. Abilio de Deus de Jesus Lima, State Secretary for the Environment. Continue reading
Tracing in areas with big and dense canopies is hard.
A couple of weeks while planning a work related trip to Timor Leste I started looking at the OpenStreetMap (OSM) for Dili. On my last trip we drove along the coast to the west of Dili, then south to Suai and east/north through Maubissie back to Dili. It was a nice drive, and I kept my GPS running throughout. The tracks were used to make minor edits on the OSM map.
