MadMappers

For the past 5 months the website has been remarkably quiet. Those who are close to the MM community know that this has been because MadMappers’ commitments have grown to such an extent that we have had little time for the website.

This is actually not correct: for financial reasons first (too much traffic!) and technical reasons later we have had to move (and set-up) our servers 3 times in the last 5 months, so in reality we have spent lot of our time learning to do ourselves all sorts of “web stuff” we knew nothing about.

And then … we spent lot of energies in many different projects which will come to some concrete results in the next few weeks. We are very excited on the future, great things are on the pipeline and we will try to update you one project at the time in the next few days. A few keywords to keep you wondering: AfricaTopo, WorldWindAfrica, Space, AfricaGIS2005, UNO ….

As some of you might have noticed that the MadMappers’ forum has been moved on Yahoo!

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MadMappers/

and it now consists of 122 members. We receive an enormous amount of mails at info@madmappers.com and it would help us immensely if some of the “how do I …” would be directed to the forum.

Finally we would like to thank many MadMappers who have actively helped in the past months, in particular Hans, Peter, Duncan and Christian.

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AfricaTopo is a Mad project aimed at creating a 20m contour map of the African continent for use as a background map on a GPS. The project is well under way and the first step has now reached completion: South Africa.

The mapset includes 20m contour lines, elevation points, trig beacons, rivers, water areas and coastline. The set is compiled transparent so that it can be used in conjunction with other GPS maps e.g. overlaid on road maps on the GPS. More information can be found at

http://www.madmappers.com/AfricaTopo/AfricaTopo1.htm

As a bonus we have included on the AfricaTopo CD the latest version (ver.1,32) of NASA World Wind free 3D interactive map of the Globe with the plug-in for your GPS.

We thank the Chief Directorate of Surveys & Mapping of South Africa for providing the data thus making this first step possible and all their staff, Sue and Raoul in particular, for being extremely patient and helpful. It is remarkable how much passion for GIS and mapmaking can be found at CD:SM, it is rare to meet someone who has fun at work!

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