I have noticed with increasing excitment and interest the plethora of online map-based crowd-sourcing projects on several subjects affecting a cross section of Nigerians. Crowd-sourcing projects provide members of a community with the opportunity to engage in the practice of collaborative innovation in the pursuit of a common agenda.   By harnessing the collective intelligence of a highly motivated and dedicated community, and by creating lightweight and flexible community led projects, members of the communities [...]

Royal Mail is piloting an initiative to map the precise co-ordinates of every home and business address in the UK.     This initiative, being piloted in East Anglia from 16 July 2012, will help improve the accuracy of location-based information used by individuals and businesses. If successful, the initiative will be rolled out across the UK later in the year.   Royal Mail said the new technology offers an advance on the traditional system [...]

Over 90% of all national mapping projects in Nigeria are 100% sponsored by the govt, however because mapping projects are competing with other projects like health, education, defence, etc, govt may not sponsor all the mapping projects that are critical to our national development.   The Issue of Funding and Nigerian NGDI Project Take the National Geo-Spatial Data Infrastructure (NGDI) project for instance. The critical impact of the NGDI on Nigerian national development strategy was [...]

I just stumbled on this laudable project to map Nigerian road network.  OpenStreetMap is a project conceived to create and provide free geographic data and mapping to anyone who wants them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nigeria OpenStreetMap is a Charity or what we call an NGO that is largely funded by public donations. The organization had seen that Nigerian mapping industry is in shambles and our surveyors are ONLY experts in 4-corner mapping [...]

I read with interest the call by the Surveyors to review the Survey Coordination Act of 1962 and its other amendments   There is no doubt that there is a need for some sort of coordination for the practice of Surveying. Personally, I feel the Act is ONLY relevant to government mapping projects. It would be difficult to implement on mapping projects undertaken by private companies. Section 1 of the Survey Coordination Act says “ [...]

I could not believe my eyes when I came across this article of Okonjo Iweala -Nigerian Finance Minister literally begging World Bank to help create a database on Nigerian poor population.   Begging or depending on World Bank (WB) to assist Nigeria create credible statistics is a gross abuse of World Bank’s (WB) resources. The next thing is, we’ll want WB’s assistance in conducting credible census, election, number of political thugs, population of senators and [...]

 Have you ever wondered what the geographic spread of telecom masts especially GSM masts in Nigeria looks like?   Sometime last year my company Spatial Technologies Ltd (STL) -Nigeria’s foremost mapping and GIS solution provider was contracted by an Abuja based Market Research organisation to undertake the project of mapping the location of all existing telecom masts across the country for a market research purpose. The project brief included the implementation of a Geospatial attribution [...]

The idea behind this competition is to implement a public portal where victims or witnesses of crimes in Lagos could document the incidents, and we would forward each incident to both the Lagos police command and the Lagos State. The winner of the competition would receive N350,000 cash towards the development of the portal. We are hoping that this project would help improve the documentation of such incidents and perhaps could lead to resolving them. [...]

  A few years ago, when you mention the word mapping “Points of Interest” (POI) in Lagos, the Land Surveyors would automatically reach for their Theodolites thinking it is time for Plane Table survey, Tachometric survey, Traverse survey, Triangulation survey, or other rigorous surveying techniques that we were taught many years ago in University of Lagos (men, I am impressed with myself that I can still remember all these surveying techniques by name after so [...]

Spatial Technologies Ltd (STL)- Nigeria’s foremost GIS solution provider and supplier of accurate digital maps and GIS data is happy to announce that it had won a contract to supply accurate map data to enable Sunmail Telecom Ltd plan the routes for proposed fibre optics project to improve broadband penetration in 9cities across Nigeria in the most effective manner.     Under the contract, STL would supply Sunmail Telecom Ltd spatially accurate edge-matched national road [...]