AfriSpatial

The Council for Geoscience, South Africa’s parastatal Science Council responsible for geological research and mapping, made tentative enquiries about implementing some Open Source GIS and database solutions early in 2011. Till then, they had made their first foray into the FOSS and Open Standards world by serving the SA 1:million lithology map via a WMS server with MapServer as part of the OneGeology project.

So we were very pleased when the Bellville satellite office, in AfriSpatial’s neck of the woods, enquired about a course for web mapping and enterprise GIS using FOSS. They had data to manage and serve, particularly as part of the South African Geological Hazards Observation System, and did not have access to the expensive proprietary software at head office in Pretoria.

Introduction to Enterprise GIS with FOSS at CGSDec 14, 2011Photos: 4

Afrispatial presented an on-site course at the CGS in December 2011 for three days, with five CGS staff and an AfriSpatial intern. We covered Enterprise GIS architecture and system design, spatial databases with PostGIS, web map servers with GeoServer and QGIS Server and web client development with OpenLayers and GeoExt. PostGIS, Geoserver and GeoExt were presented as part of the OpenGeo Suite, for which Afrispatial is the southern African partner. We ran the course on Windows but also installed OSGeo Live Xubuntu on a virtual machine and explored QGIS Server and other software within that environment. We wish the CGS all the best for a Free 2012!

Keep an eye out for upcoming courses on all things FOSS GIS at our FOSS GIS Academy.

AfriSpatial has had great fun with several varied training courses during 2011. We run commercial scheduled, on-site and one-on-one courses through the FOSS GIS Academy. As an outreach activity we run FOSS GIS courses with High School Geography teachers and have even run a few lessons with the school kids.

In May we ran our second QGIS and PostGIS course at AIMS in Muizenberg. This was a scheduled course and we had attendees from academia, consultancies and Government.

Victoria G. said: “I thought that the course was really excellent, and probably learnt more during it than most other IT courses that I have attended. Using PostGIS in particular will be the test and no doubt I will have many questions along the line but I look forward to getting stuck into using the software. A great course and very worthwhile!”

View at Picasa 02-Jun-2011 15:44, Research In Motion BlackBerry 9700

View at Picasa 02-Jun-2011 15:43, Research In Motion BlackBerry 9700

June: Introduction to QGIS, Kimberley. The Northern Cape Provincial Government Department of Environmental Affairs and Nature Conservation has switched from ESRI products and is migrating all their GIS to FOSS. This was the kick-off course to familiarise desktop users with QGIS. It was two days long and we tried to keep it as basic as possible and also worked on common GIS stumbling blocks like projections.

One of the students, Christine P., had this to say: “I love QGIS. It is so easy to use. I won’t be going back to ArcView.”

View at Picasa 01-Jul-2011 11:26, HTC HTC Magic

View at Picasa 01-Jul-2011 11:25, HTC HTC Magic

June: QGIS and PostGIS, Wits University. This was a scheduled course with attendees from academia, Government and private businesses, from small consultancies through to large corporates.

Suzi G. said: “Thanks for a fantastic introduction into the power and ability of QGIS. This has definitely swayed me to use QGIS as my GIS software of choice. Thanks to Gavin and Victoria for a truly enlightening course.”

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