MadMappers

High resolution satellite imagery with Quickbird has reached a level of detail previously only achieved by aerial photography. MadMappers brings you a taste of what Quickbird is capable of, by means of an aerial view of the Victoria Falls at the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe (courtesy of Digital Globe). Resolution was decreased by 50% to 1m/pixel and calibration of the image  was achieved with OziExplorer using GPS waypoints collected by MadMappers. The Image was then oriented to true north using GlobalMapper.

Download Victoria Falls by Quickbird (1,3Mb), load it in OziExplorer or GlobalMapper and compare it with your own GPS tracklogs or vector data. Let us know if you agree with the calibration.

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MadMappers has now available on DVDs the African collection of Zulu 7 False colour mosaics, over 30Gb of highly compressed satellite images at a resolution of just over 14m/pixel from Landsat 7.
We have chosen False Colour because of the high contrast and crispiness of the images, which allows finer features to be identified.

Price for each DVDs is R150 (US$25). For the set of available DVDs, postage charges (anywhere in the world) will not be applicable!
Check the mapsets on CD section for more details

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After a long development period www.madmappers.com goes live!
We are indeed disappointed for not having been able to secure a sponsored data server.
Many prospective sponsors have panicked as soon as they realized that the amount of download data would run in the order of hundreds of Gibabytes.
Hopefully by going live we will be able to spread our plea for one or more sponsored server.
We are particularly disappointed because we have been granted web distribution rights for South African data: we had planned to release for free download the topographic series scale 1:250k (70 maps) and 1:50k (over 2000 maps).
This would have been a first for the African continent and put MadMappers on the global map, next to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Our motto is “African GIS accessible to all”: isn’t out there anyone who shares this vision and does not wish to receive global exposure by associating its name with this ambitious project?Until further notice www.madmappers.com will supply data on media only (i.e. CD or DVD) and only in exceptional circumstances by controlled download.We would like to extend a particulat thanks to Louis Cretier (Turin, Italy; mail: clovis@libero.it): he has dedicated many months of volunteer work in developing the Meltemi map search and management system which, in our humble opinion, is superb both for provider and user. For this project Louis had to develop from scratch many innovative ways to do “web things” so that web users (i.e. ourselves) could become “web providers” without knowing how.
Without Louis the MadMappers project would have never been.

Lot of work has still to be done both on the website and on loading of data.  For an overview of the currently available MM collection click here. As we write we have 12651 maps in archive!

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