South African Geodata

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Introduction

For the FOSS4G2008 conference in Cape Town, South Africa (September 29 - Oct 3, 2008) the OSGeo Public Geospatial Data Committee would like to pull together a catalog of local data from the area around Cape Town so that there would be a readily available pool of services and local datasets for Exhibitors and Presenters to use during the conference. The hope is that this will bring attention to the efforts being made by the Public Geospatial Data Committee committee. Benefits to the conference would be fast access to services (if we were to host them somewhere locally during the conference), an increased local feel, and a resource so that we could see different applications all working with the same data.

This public data will be available for use by the FOSS4G2008 Integration Showcase.

Data Custodians

Government

National

Chief Directorate: Surveys and Mapping.

Lots of free GIS data, not many if any web services?

* Comment:  Where is the free data on this site?  I can't find any

Ecoregions of Department of Water Affairs and Forestry.

Rivers (1:500 000) of Department of Water Affairs and Forestry.

Monitoring sites of Department of Water Affairs and Forestry.

Manual downloads, no web services.

Provincial

Western Cape Provincial Government. Any GIS?

Local

City of Cape Town Corporate GIS

Stellenbosch

Meraka Institute

Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS) WMS

near-realtime and time series fire points for southern Africa: http://afis.meraka.org.za:8080/geoserver/wms

Commercial

Various companies and organizations, whether they are South African or not, may have data that they would be willing to provide for free.

DataSets

Requested Datasets

If there is a particular South African dataset that you would like to see be available at FOSS4G2008, add your request to this section. Please include the following information:

• Dataset information:
  • dataset name
  • link to dataset information (e.g. metadata)
  • link to dataset location (if publicly available)
• Your information:
  • your name (and optionally organization), and a way to contact you
  • your role in the FOSS4G2008 conference (e.g. attendee, workshop/lab instructor, sponsor, etc.)
  • why you are requesting the dataset

Request by jlivni (Josh Livni, a workshop presenter) for the following datasets for use in FOSS4G workshops. Datasets should cover, as applicable, the Western Cape at least, but preferably all of SA. In order of my personal preference/importance

* Province Boundaries
* Municipalities 
* Capetown suburbs, subcouncils, and wards
* 2006 Census shapes and attributes (preferably all, but as above, Wards at the least)
* Streets / Other transportation (bus lines?)
* Any aerial imagery
* Informal Settlements 
* Any spatial data related to urban renewal programme

Dataset Sources

While the authoritative source for a dataset is the dataset's custodian, for FOSS4G2008 the goal is to have copies of datasets, or partial datasets, on local servers at the conference. To accomplish that, local people will have to do the work of obtaining those copies and loading them onto the local servers.

If you can help with this by providing the conference organizers with a copy of all or part of one or more of the Requested Datasets, add your information to the section below.