The Sao Tome Map Project

An important aspect of the São Tomé e Príncipe map project has been the development of our process.  In many ways what we’ve doing has been exploratory and inductive, but our primary concerns for positive outcomes for the community have always guided our work.

1) Strategic Objective Planning

Before any work with São Tomé had begun the GIS research group spent some time establishing their primary objectives and overall plans for the operation.  The initial trip by Danielle, Jeanie, and Serra was designed to be a needs analysis for GIS opportunities on island; therefore, much of the planning at this point involved creating surveys and other tools for analyzing GIS needs, as well as learning as much as possible about the history and culture of São Tomé e Príncipe before leaving.  The team also acknowledged the fact that the situation on island might require different projects to be taken up after arriving there, so we as much as possible planned for alternative contingencies and stayed flexible throughout.

2) Data-Collection: São Tomé e Príncipe Field Team

Over one month in summer 2009 a pair of library science graduate student research assistants and one undergraduate in urban planning traveled to São Tomé and met with various government officials, local researchers, nonprofit workers and corporate groups in order to analyze needs and opportunities for GIS in São Tomé e Príncipe.  They also gathered and photographed as many maps as they could, bringing many paper maps back to the United States to continue the data-gathering and digitization process there.  In GIS focus group meetings with key São Toméan stakeholders they discussed and took notes on the prevalent issues challenging the country and brainstormed possibilities for GIS in addressing them.  Further, they took  and geo-coded photographs of areas around the island that could be relevant landmarks on the maps and gathered geographic data with a Garmin GPS unit to cross-reference accuracy of maps and gather coordinates for important landmarks.

3) Inventory

Upon the field team’s return an expanded group of research assistants began the task of deciphering and organizing the map material and gathering relevant local resources.  These resources included people (classes on campus that could be crowd-sourced, related faculty, staff and librarians who could help with the development of materials), technology (digitization utilities, data transport and hosting, software tools, online-translation), and associated materials/data (pictures of the island, Google map satellite images, a cited need for demographic, political and infrastructure data).  The team spent several hours exploring the maps both on computers and in person, just to become familiar with the material.

4) Digitization, Sharing, and Cataloging

Several steps occurred during this part of the process:

Image processing and photography- map photographs taken in São Tomé were cleaned up and enhanced for analysis and relatively high quality pictures were taken of the paper maps physically brought back from the island.  Pictures from the Google Maps Satellite feed were sewn together to add additional coverage of major urban areas. These images were resized and reoriented to fit with one another to create layers and full island coverage.

Presentation website and information sharing – a website concept design was drafted up to present a professional front to the operation and was subsequently reviewed by the team and translated into a Wordpress template.  Each member of the team was given an account and access to modify the site, allowing for collaborative work and the sharing of resources.  The maps were uploaded into a series of picture galleries to allow for easy access and viewing by contributing parties.  Team members helped to continually flush out and expand site and project content.

Digital map library – a trio of research assistants established a digital map library through use of Greenstone which now provides a platform for organizing stable and complete Dublin Core XML-based metadata as well as a comprehensive search interface that can be utilized to locate spatial information resources (maps as well as connected materials).  This team also took on the colossal task of translating the maps from Portuguese to English.  In addition the XML is compliant with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), which allows for its export and use in alternative database-driven applications (like Omeka, discussed below).  Greenstone also supports URL box query strings for dynamic content queries which facilitates external web applications.   Eventually a Portuguese stand-alone version of this digital map library will be created for use by the São Tomé GIS task force.

Collaborative web-based image annotation - early on a need for image annotation and data translation from Portuguese to English was known, and the researchers decided the possibility of crowd-sourcing this task would be a topic worth investigating.  Translation necessarily involves a give-and-take when it comes to meaning and interpretation, and following the process of image annotation translation itself was deemed to be a salient knowledge construction process. Very few collaborative image annotation tools exist and in the face of a growing need for graphic media processing and feedback by a larger audience of content producers this presents a pressing problem.  Luckily the researchers found Omeka, an open source archival management tool that supports addons.  The image annotation plug-in was consequently explored as a possible method for distributed group-driven image annotation.  Though only in the prototyping stage it could not only be a handy tool but might also be a good research site to better understand the construction and negotiation of meaning in translation, especially when related to spatial information.

Spatial Infrastructure Development – and associated research and process design with use of ESRI ArcGIS and Google Maps… this is in-process, to be written about more substantively soon!

5) Presentation and dissemination of information, deployment and observed use of information resources in São Tomé

The next stage in our process, yet undeveloped.

Relevance (to goals), sustainability, key people/institutions, inherent feedback/participatory design, continual evaluation (by other parties, esp. stakeholders in São Tomé)