Teflon rules!

Friday two weeks back was the day I've been waiting for - the day the Teflon Principle seemed to actually kick in.

John and I were invited to join Byron from RCMRD (http://www.rcmrd.org in a trip to meet the staff from the Geomatics Unit at the Jomo Kenyatta University for Agriculture and Technology (http://www.jkuat.ac.ke). Professor Gacahri out there is one of the movers in the KNSDI, and had responded to Byron's suggestion that some of the staff out there be given a walk-through on what, in practice, participating in operational SDI could mean to them.

The first surprise was thelab facilities. Remember, I've been in East Africa since the times when a simple PC cost a lecturer's annual salary, a single diskette cost 10 dollars, and too many undergraduate's use of GIS was limited to what they could read about in text books. Here were 30-odd PCs, a functioning LAN and good internet connectivity. My, how things change. And not a bad start at all.. no server, though.

During discussions two interesting things emereged: the first being that, when they'd had the Geonetwork toolkit described to them, the JKUAT staff immediately saw its usefulness to teh school as a potential publisher and provider of geospetial information (as well as the - to me - more obvious attraction of being able to find stuff). The second, and the one that always makes John happiest, is when they twigged that establishing and managing a geospatial would not only streamline their data provision to the students but would open up the possibility for lateral integration of data across studies, rather than just vertically within them. John's alway happiest when this data cohesion aspact emerges spontaneously.

So, the followup is that somewhere towards end of August John and Byron and I will be back out to JKUAT to do the full-blown hands-on training with the Geomatic facluty, and then two weeks after that to do another with the final-year students, though for that one I'll push that it should be the faculty that do it, with John and other's back-stopping them. Like I say, we have to maintain the Teflon Principle, and the idea of a centre of excellence emerging at a school that's already leading the effort for geospatial awareness in the region, achieveing it without any massive financial outlay, and doing it collaboratively with the RCMRD and their training services seems like a marriage made in heaven.

Frustrated Ambitions

One purpose of attempting SDI-EA has been (optimistically?) to test how feasible SDI technologies are outside OECD-type countries, using the UN's own capacities to augment local infrastructure where needs be. Over the last two week has been an exercise in frustrated realization of what the limits can be like.

It all started with a flurry of requests for data and land cover change analysis - one from the GEF evaluation office, the second from a UNEP study of refugee camps, the third from researchers in land use conflict avoidance in Kenya and Tanzania. All good stuff and, thinks I, a good chance to test some of my theories against cold, hard reality.

All these requesters, by thge way, were suffering from the delusion that UNEP/GRID still acted as some sort of massive data archive that would have the necessary data on hand. Alas, no. That's a business model that went the way of the dodo many years ago. Frustration #1 was discovering that our own backyard is in desperate need of a cleanup - the Landsat data and stuff that I know NASA delivered to us years ago is nowhere to be found. Or, more accurately, no-one knows where to find it. Oh dear.

Anyway, this is the age of the internet and postals and all we need do is know how to find the data and use our satellite capacity to pipe it into Kenya for our clients, right? Theory says that we can be clever and use on-line services to slice out justthe bits of the images for relevant study areas - a few megabytes rather than 10's or hundreds of them, smart use of limited bandwidth, more readily accesible to users in developing countries and so on.

Second frustration: NASA's geobrain (http://geobrain.laits.gmu.edu/) usually provides a neat web coverage service whereby you designate your are of interest and it goes off, interrogates the LAITS catalogues and comes back with thumbnails of the available scenes; you make your selection and it then goes to the WCS, excises the footprint you've selected and send a nicely bundled tar package your way in a matter of minutes. What's wrong with this picture? Just the fact that the services is off the air this week. Sigh

So now I'm using sites that only deliver full scenes, such as the Global Land Cover Facility's Earth Science Data Interface (http://glcfapp.umiacs.umd.edu:8080/esdi/index.jsp). Obviously a much greater demand on our satellite link but worth a try. Except for the fact that the link has been slow and flakey and up and down all week - what might otherwise be an easy 20 minute 16 Mb transfer sometimes taking half a day. Sigh. Not the sort of reliable service we'd like to offer our partners.

Glad I didn't offer to mortgage the house as guarantee of being able to deliver on the requests made to us. Maybe things will be better next week. It's still not a great advertisement for SDI, is it?

------------------------ 24 Hours later ---------------------------
Well, things have picked up a bit, and last night I actually managed to pull down 4 MMS scenes and a full TM set, a total of about 350 Mb - not a huge volume of data in these days of streaming media but significant in this part of the world. Now, if only GeoBrain start behaving itself....

--------------- ... and 24 Hours after that? ----------------------
Well, some hacks and work-arounds later, I've managed to pull down about 10 Thematic Mapper and half a dozen MSS scenes, a total of about 2 gigabytes of compressed data moved as scheduled downloads overnight while UNEP's bandwidth is mostly unused. Frustration the Thjird:As it turns out, the usefulness of all this data was pretty limited, usually because the change signals being sought were not significant at the resolution of the Landsat data. This is where having had Geobrain working earlier would have really helped: at least the limitations of the images would have been apparent earlier and more quickly, and the requesters could have adapted their expectations.

Now, this gets me thinking: why am I downloading data from Maryland anyway? What if the Regional Centre for Mapping Resource Development here in Nairobi could bring its Landsat archive on-line, a sort of Geobrain East Africa? Must have a word with my friend Byron about that possibility...

SDI Reaching the Conservation Community

The Society for Conservation GIS last week held their first three-day conference hosted here at the UN compound in Nairobi. SCGIS is an ESRI-supported advocacy group that - as the name implies - promotes uptake of GIS as a conservation analysis, planning and communication. There are nearly 200 eager young minds from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda here presenting and receiving collective wisdom and experience.

They've all also had their minds expanded by such luminaries of the world of conservtaion as Nobel laureate Wangarai Maathai, ex-head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, David Western, and world-reknowned elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton. Much of the material is what you might expect of traditional wildlife-and-protected-area conservation issues; others, however, have focus on community-based conservation effort, and one, for heaven's sake, concerned the determination of genetic diversity of the Bongo (Kenya's most endangered antelope).

The fact that UNEP has ended up helping sponsor SCGIS is entirely the result of accidentally meeting the powerhouse behind their efforts, Lucy Wariungi. That accidental meeting arose from having gotten another spur from Kate Lance about a Kenyan metadata presentation slated for an ICT conference back in February. I ran away from work (our Governing Council, in fact) and gate-crashed the conference and, thus, ended up taking tea with Lucy and with Richard Okello Oluoch of KWS. Life has not been the same since.

John and I have, of course, taken the chance to subvert some impressionable young people to the joys of SDI. This has been instructive inasmuch as the vast majority of these students and their lecturers are of the mindset of having to build their own stacks - gather their data, hardware, software, skills and personnel in one room and then start their analysis. The potential for component-based services is a novelty and EA-SDI just had to grab the opportunity to prosetalyze. So we've had one keynote presentation (here 9Mb, sorry) on SDI in general, the UNSDI and the SDI-EA effort; another keynote from Craig von Hagen about FAO's SDI-without-being-an-SDI, plus a tech workshop demonstrating open-standards publishing data, plus lots of Q&A over coffee and samosas. A serendipitous discovery on Friday resulted from a presentation by a small start-up company in Nakuru out there promoting open standards and open source on a commercial basis - it would seem that John and I have been out there undermining his market not even aware of his existence. Whoops. Must work on a bit of capacity building to remedy that!

There are two really nice outcomes of all this is. One is that there are now at least half a dozen local 3rd-year students seriously pursuing me to help them organize internships with UNEP, a task that I relish. The second is that we have a have finally nailed down Kenya Wildlife Services for a WFS installation session with John and Mick. This means (fingers crossed) that we'll then be that many steps closer to another goal of mine, namely getting national authorities able to directly load to the World Database of Protected Areas ( http://sea.unep-wcmc.org/wdpa ) starting with a showcase here in East Africa, namely, KWS.

Well, actually, there may be three possible nice outcomes, the third being the possibility of trying to schmooze an invitation to Mpala Ranch and Research Centre out on the Laikipea Plateau to see of we can't get some interoperability going there. If it does work out then that's one that I'll do with Sabrina and Mikele rather that with John.

The next task is to try sell Lucy on the idea of SCGIS becoming advocate for evolving an East African conservation SDI... get all these important researchers to actually start doing something about serving data and information to their colleagues, especially the ones across the borders in Tanzania and Uganda. What you think, Lucy?

Whoops! Unanticipated Blessings Upon SDI-EA

One of the participants in last Thursday's hands-on training was Daniel Olilo from the regional remote sensing centre here in Nairobi, the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD http://www.rcmrd.org). RCMRD's constituency is member states from Djibouti to Zambia and a bunch of affiliates - in other words they cover the are very much of interest to SDI-EA AND they have the ear of their governments.

Anyway, Daniel went enthusiastically and enlightenedly back to work and, on Monday, pitches the whole open-standards publishing-to-the-web thing to his director, Wilbur Ottichelo, a man I've known and worked with for over 15 years. Wilbur calls me on Tuesday looking for a meeting and a chance to follow up on this tech support question. I say "yeah, sure" - we've been hoping for months to get RCMRD on board SDI-EA for all sorts of reasons: a centre of technical expertise, a long history of collaboration with UNEP and FAO, close engagement with the Kenyan national SDI effort, and so on and so on. A natural partnership, even stronger with their establishment of a Geonetwork Opensource node (http://www.rcmrd.org/geonetwork/) already publishing ISO 19115 metadata to the web. Wilbur and I agree that John and I will pop over Thursday afternoon which, by pure happenstance, will follow my director's meet-and-greet with Wilbur that morning.

So, off we go, have a quickie guided tour of the facility (which, to my chagrin, I realized I'd not visited in well over ten years - my, how it's grown!) and an excellent chat with Wilbur when, lo!, we're led back to the boardroom and find it converted into a networked training centre with eight RCMRD staff there raring to go for a re-run of last week's hands-on. And, of course, John and I are caught completely flat-footed. I hadn't actually caught Wilbur's intent, and neither John nor I were in the mental zone for a stand-up training session.

Nonetheless, into the fray, and this time in less than three hours we had the workers installed with their open standards server toolkit running and VERY beautifully accessing and combining geo-data from their different servers. A nice test of resiliency, if you ask me. Not least of all, Daniel's resiliency in very competently taking on the training role and supporting his colleagues with the skills he picked up last week. I love viral learning.

Most importantly, however, is that here is a technical institution whose very mandate requires servicing to governments on complex geo-data and remote sensing issues, and that has a truly unique business value to offer to SDI-EA. Most significant to me, thought, is that RCMRD is a training centre par excellence and today presents the prospect that, hey, my 'train-the-trainer' fixation arising from last Thursday's effort might already have at least one natural home.

To whit, UNEP, in a capacity building and tech transfer mode expends time and effort (but damn little money) to get RCMRD staff sufficiently up to speed where they can effectively render John and me jobless, at least in this outreach department. RCMRD get a marketable addition to their training portfolio, one that they can specifically target to the functionaries of the Government of Kenya, the IGOs and NGOs in Nairobi and their constituent members ates, some of whom at least are considering national SDI efforts. Meanwhile, UNEP and DEPHA and FAO and RCMRD (and interested others) work up some specific interoperability testbeds in the local environment and commit to keep these running for the next 2-3 years. As Kenya's national and international comms infrastructure is fibred and brought up to capacity they collectively provide a standard framework in which to measure responsiveness, utility, stability and the likes. Oh, what fun, methinks.

SDI-EA First Handzon Training Changes Life as we Know It

Thursday last week saw twenty eager trainees from 10 Nairobi-based institutions (see list at the end) got their first taste on-line data publishing. In a three-and-a-half hour session they went from a clean slate to having installed the necessary services and data management tools for implementing open web services for geo-data delivery based on OGC specifications.

The training session, in true SDI-EA fashion, was a no-cost no-fuss joint effort by UNEP/DEWA and FAO/SWALIM. We cobbled together a local network, participants showed up with their own laptops, and mwalimu John Mugwe got them underway installing postgreSQL with postGIS as their spatial database, plus geoserver as their web feature service. In many cases trainees also had their first taste of implementing Java and the Tomcat servlet container. Participants also learned how to take their own geospatial data (shapefiles) and ingest them into the database, and saw for themselves the utility of open-source GIS applications like qGIS and uDIG.

All this novelty notwithstanding, and despite having to deal with trojan-infected PCs and confusion caused by previous unclean installations of some of the software, by the end of the session every single system was up and running and participants were accessing each others data across the network and integrating them in their local client. Yes, they had the beginnings of a microcosm of an SDI running then and there. Now, if only the Nairobi internet becomes ready for prime time then we'll really have something to show.

And quite an eye-opener it was for them. I am sure that if we'd offered to keep the training sesion going that these eager beavers would have kept hacking away all afternoon. As it is we'll just have to see when and where else we can host these and follow-up sessions. I am keen to do at least one out here at the UN for other colleagues in Habitat, UNESCO and Unicef, but there's an obvious need for more sessions in more accessible places. There's also the need to follow-up incorporating the Geonetwork Opensource kit, which some local centres are already running but could use further promotion to help get over the metadata authoring hurdle. Perhaps the RCMRD or Survey of Kenya could be coaxed into hosting (the context of KNSDI development rings loudly here), or maybe we get the CGIAR institutions to engage with some local players. However we do it's obvious that John and I can't do all this in our spare time and, invoking our Teflon Approach, look for ways to pass on the Bright Torch of Training to others. Hmmm, I wonder if UNEP's own Capacity Building programme would give us a hand there?

The participating agencies were: African Rescue Committee AFREC http://www.afrec.org/ Data Excahange Platform for the Horn of Africa DEPHA http://www.depha.org Regional Centre for Mapping Resources for Development RCMRD http://www.rcmrd.org/ Somali Support Secretariat CEFA http://www.somalisupportsecretariat.info/ UN FAO Food Security Analysis Unit FAO-FSAU http://www.fsausomali.org UN FA Somalia water and land Information Management FAO-SWALIM www.faoswalim.org/ UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs OCHA Regional http://ochaonline.un.org/ UNEP/DEWA http://www.unep.org/dewa UN-Habitat http://www.un-habitat.org UN High Commissioner for Refugees UNHCR-Somalia http://www.unhcr.org/country/som.html

There's an SDI-EA training ulumnis' mailing list at sdi-ea-hackers@als.unep.org

Kenyan SDI Development on Steroids

Wednesday of this week brought a refreshing surprise. The secretariat of the Kenyan National SDI (http://www.knsdi.go.ke) held a one-day seminar to review the current draft standards, to which I was invited. I will admit that, as an observer of the KNSDI process for nearly five years now, I was not anticipating that much real progress would have been made. Boy, was I ever wrong!.

Two important factors had completely slipped under my radar. The first was the fact that the Kenyan Bureau of Standards (http://www.kebs.org/) has adopted 13 of the ISO 19100 draft international standards as Kenyan national standards. The second was the fact that the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (www.jica.go.jp/english/) has had a team working here for over a year on a joint project with Survey of Kenya and others. They're taking the 13 standards and, based on the experience gained in developing Japan's own SDI, are coming up with profiles, procedures and practices for putting five of those standards (six if count the ISO 19101 reference model) into operational practice. This is great! In a matter of months they have jump-started the whole Keyan SDI effort, getting past many of the institutional roadblocks that impede progress elsewhere. Yes, this is a first cut and no doubt the current drafts will need modification, or more elements added, as experience is gained. But at least there is now a basis for gaining that experience, such as SoKs campaign to vectorize over 900 topological map sheets at 1:50,000 scale, with all geo-processing, quality assurance and metadata development taking place within the framework of these standards. I look forward to aligning the UN's own SDI development (http://www.ungiwg.org/unsdi) and the efforts of SDI-EA to this fabulous work and to further, real progress in the near future.

Political Will

My partner Sabrina works for UNEP's water quality assessment programme, GEMS/water (http://www.gemswater.org). Somehow, last night, out beside our campfire in the backyard, we got onto data sharing (yes, we were being that romantic in the firelight) and she told me tow stories that really shook my tendency to stare myopically at technical issues and forget about the institutional and the psychological.

Both stories hinge around the GEMstat database (http://www.gemstat.org), a global repository which relies on countries sending in their water quality measurement data. Getting these data can, in some cases and despite having agreements in place, be a trial in patience with unaccountable delays and excuses. In other cases....

Sri Lanka, two weeks after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, delivers 4 years worth of data. Last week, on the same day that a suicide bombing kills 29 in Baghdad, the Iraqi focal point delivers his country's first block of data to GEMStat. "How", one wonders, "can people bother with silly data delivery when really terrible things are happening around them?" and this brings us to Sam's point in these stories - political will.

Examples like these two might be more extreme than most of use would ever wish to deal with but, by and large, the impediments that we perceive as preventing or constraining data and information exchange - whether technical or institutional - can be overcome give sufficient political will. Conversely, all the technology and memoranda in the world are useless if not backed up by such will. I found here tales to be a salutary reminder that, too often, we really do tend to focus on the wrong parts of these problems.

Anyway, more tomorrow about recent exciting developments in the Kenyan National SDI (http ://www.kndsi.go.ke) effort, and the fun and games today of our first hands-on technical training session on open web services.