In July Cart had the opportunity to send GIS Officer, Bernard Wright, to attend the Applied Geo-informatics for Society and Environment (AGSE) Conference and Summer School in the Stuttgart University for Applied Sciences. It proved to be an enlightening forum where alumni of the university, academics and practitioners from most continents interacted.

Bernard presented his experience from the late 2008 deployment to Haiti. One attendee was especially interested getting involved in this area until he realised the talk was not about Tahiti, the tropical paradise island, but Haiti, one of the most poverty stricken countries in the world. The Haiti work proved quite interesting for the attendees as it was an example of the capacity to roll out a GIS in a matter of days into a volatile information-starved environment and immediately produce quality maps and related products for use by a variety of agencies. In contrast, most of the other projects presented were ones which methodically built a GIS over a lengthy period of time.

 One of the more interesting talks was on the topic of standardizing geographical names by an attendee from Morocco, an issue we had problems addressing while working on a map of Baghdad for our recent work with the UNHCR. This map required street names; however, this was not so straightforward. It turned out that the names of the roads varied according to

* If it was before, during or after Sadaam’s reign
* The language (Arabic/English) and alphabet script used
* Names assigned by different ethnic groups

One of the most worthwhile sessions was the workshop on /Open Source Desktop GIS. /Having used ArcGIS and spent plenty of money on licenses it was great to see that there is a Free Open Source GIS out there which has similar capabilities. The Sextante plug-in is an analysis suite with over 220 tools. Seems like a very promising project.

But it was not only the speeches and workshops that were useful; there was some fascinating conversations with others attendees who are working on some great tools. William Barragan from the University of Bogata, Colombia spoke about how they made some minor modifications to a remote controlled helicopter so that it could accommodate a regular digital camera. Flying this above a specific area they easily took a photo for import into a GIS. One can only imagine how easily we could have quickly come up with quality maps of the multiple camps in North Uganda if Cart had this tool at hand. And at less than $1000 for the full package, in comparison with retailed aerial imagery, it’s economical too!

On the last day, the attendees had the great pleasure to drop by InfoTerra who have the exclusive rights to the TerraSar-X satellite and got up close and personal with one of their satellites which they are planning to launch very soon.

The University of Applied Sciences have mentioned they are eager to keep in touch with Cart regarding future collaborations, as are we.