Re: An Elephant is Faithful 100%

I can donate a development server for this, if its required ...

On Fri, 18 Nov 2005, Chris Travers wrote:

> I can donate some time.
>
> The best email for getting in touch with me about this is
> chris(at)metatrontech(dot)com
>
> Josh Berkus wrote:
>
>> Folks,
>>
>> I recently received the following appeal from the African Elephant
>> Database. They need help migrating to PostGIS and building out their
>> application.
>> I, personally, cannot imagine a more compelling project which deserves the
>> PostgreSQL community's collective help. The elephant is our mascot!
>> Plus the AED folks introduced the idea of making this a general OSS project
>> for species conservation databases.
>>
>> Who's available?
>>
>> ---------------------------
>> I'm writing with to explore the possiblity of a collaboration between
>> Postgresql, PostGIS and the African Elephant Database (AED) of the IUCN/SSC
>> African Elephant Specialist Group (AfESG). Please allow me to begin by
>> giving you a little background on all those acronyms, in reverse order.
>>
>> The AfESG is a group of elephant experts from across the African continent
>> who, aside from their daily jobs, disinterestedly lend their skills to
>> provide technical advice on elephant conservation and management. The
>> mission of the AfESG is to promote the long-term conservation of African
>> elephants throughout their range, and the group focuses its efforts on
>> capacity building, alleviation of human-elephant conflict, compilation and
>> dissemination of technical information, and the development of elephant
>> conservation strategies. Led by a volunteer chair, the AfESG has a small
>> secretariat in Nairobi, Kenya. Please see http://iucn.org/afesg/ for
>> details.
>>
>> The AfESG is one of the most active of over 120 Specialist Groups of the
>> IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC). The largest conservation grouping
>> in
>> the world, the SSC is a worldwide network of over 7,000 volunteer experts
>> working to conserve the diversity of species found on Earth. The SSC is
>> responsible for the production of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
>> See http://iucn.org/themes/ssc and http://www.redlist.org.
>> The SSC is the largest of the six commissions of IUCN - The World
>> Conservation Union. IUCN is the world's largest and most important
>> conservation network. The Union brings together 82 States, 111 government
>> agencies, more than 800 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and some
>> 10,000 scientists and experts from 181 countries in a unique worldwide
>> partnership. IUCN's mission is to influence, encourage and assist societies
>> throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and
>> to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically
>> sustainable. The World Conservation Union was founded in October 1948
>> following an international conference in Fontainebleau, France. IUCN HQ is
>> in Gland, Switzerland. See http://iucn.org/.
>>
>> The African Elephant Database
>> The AED is a geographical information (GIS) system used to maintain an
>> accurate and up-to-date record on the distribution and abundance of African
>> Elephants. The AED is regularly updated, with data on elephant range and
>> numbers constantly being solicited from wildlife authorities and experts
>> across the continent, and a major report is produced every three years and
>> made available in the AfESG website (see http://iucn.org/afesg/aed/).
>>
>> The AED currently runs in ESRI ArcGIS 9.1., in a personal geodatabase (MS
>> Access) format. We obtained ArcInfo through one of ESRI's conservation
>> program grants - but soon we were being asked to pay for maintenance
>> charges
>> in excess of USD3,000 per annum. Despite these costs, we are considerably
>> constrained by the limitations of the set-up - including the MS Access 2Gb
>> size limit. If we were to upgrade our configuration to a full geodatabase
>> would involve acquiring ESRI's Spatial Database Engine (SDE) plus a
>> commercial RDBMS such as Oracle, DB2 or MS SQL server, at a one-off cost of
>> several thousand dollars and annual maintenance fees to match.
>> Such costs are well beyond our reach, we are hoping to build a more
>> sustainable solution using open source software. Although opensource GIS
>> has
>> not evolved as much or as quickly as opensource relational databases, we do
>> have some hopes that a suitable system could be developed to maintain the
>> AED. The AED is the most comprehensive species database in existence, and
>> we
>> believe there would be value in developing a turnkey solution that can be
>> used to maintain monitoring information on other species for which there
>> are
>> relatively good data.
>>
>> We've got the elephant and the database in common. If you think a
>> collaboration could be productive and mutually beneficial, please let me
>> know so that we can begin to explore the options.
>> I look forward to hearing from you.
>>
>> Sincerely,
>>
>> Julian Blanc
>> Manager, African Elephant Database
>> IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group
>> Email: julian(dot)blanc(at)iucn(dot)org
>> Web: http://iucn.org/afesg/
>> --------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>
>
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