AfricaMap beta now available - new online GIS site

The beta platform of Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis launched AfricaMap

It is a free website that brings together a huge amount of geodata on Africa. Long awaited its now publicly available. It includes a lot of data layers and is a good beginning for bringing together the available data sets of Africa.

• Complete Soviet topographic maps at 1:500,000
• Satellite imagery
• Soil data
• Ethnographic regions
• Languages
• HRAF + ethnologue
• 1:2,000,000 surficial geology layer
  
• 1,000,000 placenames from Geonames

Additionally many historic maps have been scanned and geo-referenced to

overlay such as the data from the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology,

Transatlantic Slave Trade database and A lot more!!!

Metadata is attached to vector rectangles of individual

map sheets, which all have been de-collared.

Anything not protected by Crown Copyright (or other copyright) will be available for download.

It also includes JING application which is a great app for extracting

selections from the map and exporting them to include in a publication

if you credit and cite properly.

So browse at http://africamap.harvard.edu

Some part of the data is still in the test mode (in the servers )although majority of it is

in the public website right now. It runs best on Firefox 2.0, but also runs fairly well on Internet Explorer 7.0