EBOOKS

GISEEM Technical Manual for Ecological Mapping

By Toivio Olavi Tomi

	FREE

OVERVIEW

This manual documents the GIS platform of the GIS Enhanced Ecological Mapping for Improved Governance of Natural Resources (GISEEM) project. The GISEEM platform is used by local
communities to document the environmental and cultural knowledge of three areas in Kenya, Giitune, Mukogodo and Karima.

The first part of this manual covers the basics of installation and administration of the server and the database. Use of uDig for editing is covered in the last part of the manual.

The section about editing GIS data with uDig is useful for the community participants. Editing with uDig requires some understanding about basic use of computers. Use of uDig is quite similar to using a vector drawing program such as Inkscape. Basically you are just drawing maps instead vector graphics.

The first sections are about installation, administration and configuration of Geoserver and the Postgis database for the administrators of the GIS platform. Installation and administration is
covered for both Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP. Typically command line is used for Linux installation while Windows has easy to use graphical installers.

The administrator would need basic knowledge about GPS and GIS, basic knowledge of SQL databases, and some command line Linux administration skills if Linux is used. JavaScript web programming skills are useful if there is a need to create some more complicated interfaces to the data with OpenLayers. OpenLayers programming is not covered in this manual.