Upande is currently looking for an experienced geoweb developer. Someone to help us build high quality geoweb applications. We use the latest technology to create applications of outstanding quality. The ideal candidate must be able to work independently and translate the customer’s wishes into a range of available geoweb applications built on several architectures.

Qualifications and experience:
* A higher professional or university education in GIS, Geography or ICT
* At least 3 years of professional experience in the development of successful geoweb applications using PHP, Python, Java, JavaScript (Ajax), MySQL, XHTML/CSS
* Extensive experience with KML (if you have to google KML, please don't apply) and various map APIs
* Experience with Linux preferred
* Good command of the English language
* Good communication skills
* Flexible work attitude, passionate and committed

It is important that you feel comfortable in a small company with an informal atmosphere and friendly colleagues and that you enjoy keeping tabs on the latest technological developments in the internet field.

What does Upande offer?

Challenging short term initial contract work with the potential for longer term attachment in a small, highly innovative company. Initially internal work with more outward facing roles in the future.
A competitive salary, depending on your qualifications and experience.
Interested?

If you’re interested in working with Upande, please send us your CV including sample work and references by e-mail (info[at]upande.com).

Karura Forest has had many negative associations with many Kenyans in the past, due to crime, killings and disappearance of people there in the past. As a result of this, Karura Forest is an area 'off bounds' for many people, despite the unique forest that it is with many indigenous plant and tree species, as well as a wide variety of birds monkeys and other mammals which Professor Wangari Maathai of the Green Belt Movement played a key role in saving.

Hopefully this limited access is going to change in the near future, largely due to the fact that Friends of Karura Forest, together with the Kenyan Forestry Service, are working hard to protect the unique area. Plans are to build an electric fence around the entire forest, to increase security and patrolling, ultimately with the aim to preserve the forest and allow people to enjoy its beauty and to recreate there. A very worthwhile cause which will require a lot of funding and hard work.

One project which will contribute to this aim is today's mapping of the paths and points of interest, an initiative driven by the MapKibera.org initiative, an OpenStreetMap based community approach. Today a team of volunteers, many of them recently having become mapping experts, have successfully mapped large parts of the forest. Upande was there to participate, mingle and see the forest from up close, a beautiful area! Keep an eye open for changes coming to OpenStreetMap soon.

Upande is currently looking for an experienced web developer. Someone to help us build high quality web applications. We use the latest technology to create applications of outstanding quality. The ideal candidate must be able to work independently and translate the customer’s wishes into a web application.

It is important that you feel comfortable in a small company with an informal atmosphere and friendly colleagues and that you enjoy keeping tabs on the latest technological developments in the internet field.

Qualifications and experience:

• A higher professional or university education
• At least 3 years of professional experience in the development of web applications using PHP, JavaScript (Ajax), MySQL, XHTML/CSS, Python, Java
• Experience with CMS systems including Joomla
• Exposure to the geo field would be of added value
• Experience with Linux preferred
• Good command of the English language
• Good communication skills
• Flexible work attitude, passionate and committed

What does Upande offer?

Challenging short term initial contract work with the potential for longer term attachment in a small, highly innovative company. Initially internal work with more outward facing roles in the future.
A competitive salary, depending on your qualifications and experience.

Interested?

If you’re interested in working with Upande, please send us your CV including sample work and references by e-mail (info[at]upande.com).

In a previous post on Upande.com, OSM technology used in MapKibera.org was described. One may wonder how the OSM model compares to Google MapMaker which is Google's 'editable Google Maps', and of which all vectors can also be downloaded for free for non commercial use.

OSM differs in the fact that it is mainly built up with GPS on the ground by local experts. This is more accurate though also more time consuming than tracing on top of satellite imagery, which is characteristic of Google's approach. As Google can easily provide high resolution satelite imagery and can benefit from any contributors they are able to mobilize all working in the 'cloud', their approach is more scalable though potentially also less accurate from a thematic perspective, depending on the community they are able to engage.

There are quite a few comparing studies online including Mikel's analysis which analyses coverage for Nairobi objectively but is clearly written from an OSM perspective in terms of licensing. For individuals or organisations wanting themselves to be found through any of the Google platforms within minutes, MapMaker is the way to go. And with Google's dominance in search in general, this is a wise thing to do for most people.

Downloading of MapMaker GIS data is very interesting for the non commercial sectors due to Google's impressive satellite imagery acquisition channels and their unrestricted data licensing model for non commercial use. For full commercial flexibility either in online or offline maps or based on the raw GIS data, OSM has a lot more to offer.

So both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages and have proven that they have made huge impacts. MapKibera definitely fills a hole in any map, including in Google's map. And the level of detail captured in a densely populated area such as Kibera can definitely not be captured on satellite imagery.

Online databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL are very popular for storing large amounts of data online, including geometry fields for storing points, lines and areas. Google has recently launched an online database like product called Fusion Tables which allows one to store large amounts of data in the cloud, analyse the data, link it to other tables, etc. Some really powerful features include viewing the data on a map, charting, views, and export to KML for integration with map products. Until recently one was only able to display point based data using a latitude and longitude coordinate pair, or by geocoding placenames on the fly.

As of this week one is also able to import KML data which represents the different vector formats, points, lines, polygons. This means that Fusion Table's storage can be used for storing large GIS datasets, analyse them (based on attributes) and output them to different map products. See a quick example below of some admin boundaries for Kenya which I imported. 

I will explore these new exciting features more in the (holidays) coming days and show more of what is possible.