Selected Modules in Winter 2012/13 Semester

The following courses were pursued in the winter semester of the academic year 2012/ 2013

• GIS Project 

• GIScience: Theories and Concepts  

• Cartography and Geovisualization 

• Ontologies and Semantics (Harmonizing Geospatial Information)  

• Design of Geospatial Data Models  

• Distributed GI Architectures  

• Fundamentals and Concepts of Software Engineering 

• Geosimulation 

• Location Based Services  

• Softwaredesign for Geoinformatics  

• Global Problems and Perspectives

• Spatial Analysis

Rectangular Buffer Tools

Apart from using the available GIS tools in readily available commercial and open source software. The course in Msc Applied Geoinformatics provided opportunities for me to apply established GIScience concepts in  creating usable GIS tools. One of such tools was the rectangular buffer script tool created for the ArcGIS 10 software. Using python language, the tool was designed to accept user input including point features and the buffer distance and then computing rectangular buffers around the point features.

Additionally, adequate documentation was provided to help any users of such tools. I have been able to develop small scripts to carry out minor repetitive tasks in ArcGIS 10 including scripts to carry out spline interpolation on point features with many fields in the attribute table.

International Schools, Star Hotels and First Class Hospitals in Nairobi

In this class project, OpenLayers javascript library was used to create a web map application of international schools, top class hotels and international standard hospitals in Nairobi Kenya, this was the key deliverable for the Web Mapping.

In the project, Google Maps, Google hybrid, Google terrain and Open Street Maps were used as base layers while international schools, top star hotels and international standard hospitals were added as over-layers. The overlays were introduced as vector layers with clickable popups as can be seen in the image below.

Field work:Sasumua Catchment, Kenya

Between July 2012 and October 2012, I had the privilege of carrying out a field work in Sasumua Catchment Kenya. The original intention was to collect data that I would use for my final thesis. The full report is embedded below: