This is a “Birds of a Feather” - more of a discussion on a subject:

Ben Lewis, Infrastructure for Collaboration

Ben provides consulting services to researchers, professors,. research and focus areas. Been working with bunch of professors interested in Africa. Lack of data is a big problem. came to the job with a lot of interest and background in building web-based systems that serve up a lot of data and easy to access. Good fit for this academic environment because these systems tend to be inter-disciplinary orientated, webbased systems tend to be easy to use. Humanitarians, historians, social sciences.

The idea was to build a web-based system to bring together best available data for Africa, make it easy to find by making it visible, make it map layers. As we started thinking, we realised there’s basically no base-map. It’s a big place, it’s the US, Soviet Union and India combined. There hasn’t been commercial interest the way there has been for western europe and the US. You go to Google and it’s a big blank. We wanted to try to remedy that, we have a vast collection of maps in the Harvard map library, like 300 map drawers full of all kinds of stuff. The key stuff being map series data at 1:5,000,000 scale down to 1:1,000 scale. From 1980 to 1880, by the Russians, French. So there is quite a bit of data for the continent and we came up with this approach to provide a base map.

Will all be tilecache, open layers, open source stuff and creative commons. The problem isn’t that there’s a lot of data, it’s just impossible to get to. Instead of building years to get something useful we can do it in a matter of months, by fall 2008.

This is largely about historical GIS, it will be a historical basemap. Most recently 1980, large amounts 1950s (JMCK: crown copyright limits?). Everything we can bring in as web services will be a no brainer.

Also have lots of researchers who study Africa, then finish their research and the data “disappears”. It’s a particular problem for Africa where resources are tight. People can end up reinventing the wheel. Permanent data source for Africa projects.

Internal funding only so far. Build this thing then go after additional funds.

Suzanne Blier and Peter Bol mane investigators.

Data can be hard to find because if it’s in digital form it’s buried on one server somewhere. Encourage replication, make it easy for people to download and make available. Text based search of contents - “Google-type text search”. Throw all data, text, vector, etc. into PostGIS and “see what we get back”.

Place name gazetteer, starting with the data from geonames.org, as you combine gazetteer with old data, new entries will show up and these will need feeding back into geonames.org. Gazetteer becomes useful for unstructured texts to be geocoded. Decentralized architecture - we’ll be serving up some of these data layers. Would like to share tile caches. As data is brought out into the light of the web, would be good if it didn’t all need to sit on Harvard’s servers. Other interested parties could host their own. Have multiple sources of “hybrid” as backdrops. Interesting possibilities, historic basemaps, 1950s for Ghana for example. Combined with Google’s satellite from 2006 you can see where new roads are and all kinds of change. Quite practical change analysis that can be done by anyone with simple tools. Multiple scales, key datalayer will be US as the licensing is very simple - public domain - down to 500K in some areas. Russian mapping at few scales. Several countries and cities will go down to 1:50k. Working out the process but it’s more efficient than we expected. Country in Africa can do it inexpensively “Mad Mappers” in South Africa. Countries in this country have already digitised and are eager to work with us. Will let us bring a whole lot of data out quickly that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Concurrent layer viewing, ability to view data in 3 dimensions. Data in web client exported to Google Earth via superoverlays (allows smoother zooming). Google Earth will require it in Plate Carré. Ben is a huge huge enemy of slow web systems. Lots of ideas for other datasets. David Rumsey will be contributing his Africa maps. Ethnographic data form Murdoch. Socio-cultural-political-economic data. Lots of collections at Harvard are going geographical. Harvard museum has millions of specimens taken from Africa that could be georeferenced.

Building the base, showing Google for Africa and some data they have for the area.

[Showing coverage maps]

Geonomy map, query of large vector dataset in WMS on top of google map. Africa map will be an openlayers client.

Q: What software are you using from scanning/georeferencing?

A: In some cases we buy them already done. It will be creative commons in some form. Depends partly on the source.

Languages, cultures, currently from commercial data but could perhaps be user generated.

Q: Are you mainly looking to put this data out or looking for collaboration from users to develop it?

A: The basic goal is to prime the pump. There’s not much data for Africa and it’s difficult to get hold of, it’s paper maps buried away. Bringing out key strategic data layers out of the map bins and putting it onto the web with some simple collaboration tools

Key concept is a projects layer, researchers working on a particular part of Africa can draw a polygon and advertise that they’re working on a project/topic and give contact details. General purpose, very simple place where people can coordinate across departments and disciplines.

Q: Africa’s a big place, could you perhaps be looking too broad?

A: It would be easy to spin-off smaller views of this. We could be focussed on a city. One very obvious enhancement would be to be able to create a login and create a “my Africa map”. Specify an area of interest and be able to load in your own data layers, photos, documents, other digital artifacts and save and organise those. We’re opening this up to all disciplines who might want to work on Africa based projects.

We’re working on these various parts of the projects, tilecache, WMS, gazetteer and we’ll see how things develop, some parts may be more useful and will be developed specifically.

[discussion about geonames being owned by Google/Teleatlas, GNS being a cleaner alternative]

Q: What do you see your audience being?

A: We have a steering committee. They have to be impressed, and the Harvard community. They are, however, not isolated, they’ll be professors, researchers. If they say this is valuable, that will be important. In reality we’re building an OpenLayers client with historic base layers. That doesn’t exist for Africa.

africamap.harvard.edu

Technorati tags: africamap, map, africa, where, where2.0, where2008