Gothos

It’s been awhile since my last post – I’ve been locked away in my apartment on research leave for the past two weeks. I’m working on a database-backed web directory for finding GIS data, as I’m tired of dealing with bookmarks, html lists, and protracted web searches for keeping track of datasets. The goal is to keep it simple and standards-based. The basic architecture is in place; I’m just struggling to learn and apply PHP. Fingers crossed, I may have a prototype ready by the end of my next round of leave this summer.

I’m also still reading Georeferencing by Linda Hill, which extensively covers gazetteers and and metadata standards.  It’s definetly worth checking out, from a library near you.

I received an email floating around the Maps-L listserve the other day with an announcement about a website that had African GIS data. Since free, global GIS data can be hard to find, particularly for Africa, I thought I’d re-announce it here.

The Southern African Human-development Information Management Network (SAHIMS) is a UN affiliated organization that provides humanitarian and disaster relief for countries in southern Africa. They have a pretty comprehensive collection of GIS data on their site: http://www.sahims.net. The default GIS page provides layers that cover the entire region, plus some layers for Tanzania (which is technically outside the region). But you can use the menu on the left of the page to navigate to country-specific data for: Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. There doesn’t appear to be any data for South Africa.

The layers are in shapefile format and include administrative boundaries (including sub-national boundaries), transportation, hydrological features, climate, food, and disaster related layers. The availability and details of each layer vary by country.

I downloaded a few of the layers, and many were missing spatial reference information. However they do provide decent metadata on their site, and you can use it to define the coordinate and projection system for each layer.