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Project "Lake Chad Sustainable Water Management"
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Welcome to the entry page of the "Lake Chad Basin interactive water resources mapping and information retrieval.
This site is being build for the project "Lake Chad Sustainable Water Management", which was awarded in August 2005 by the
German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ)
to
AHT GROUP AG, Germany
.
The aim of the project is to support the
Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC)
located in N'Djamena to strengthen its capacity in water resources planning. The dissemination of up-to-date information on water resources and demands is one of the key issues of the project. First reviews revealed that in the past a large amount of monitoring data and maps have been collected and processed. However, access to the information available appears to be cumbersome.
In view of the large geographical extent of the basin and its very unevenly distributed water resources, the location of monitoring stations is of particular importance. Connecting monitoring data with maps and showing their temporal variation in charts is very helpful for a better understanding of the situation.
In the age of Internet and Open Source software such information can be compiled and made accessible at very low cost, even in the heart of Africa. Thereby, the information is not presented through static pages but compiled according user demands.
The design of this site started in October 2005, its first public appearance was in November 2005. The following software has been used:
Web hosting is on a virtual web server in Germany; Linux Fedora Core 3 operating system;
Database is
PostgreSQL
, both for monitoring data and geographic vector data (like points, lines and areas)
The web map server (WMS) is
UMN MapServer
;
Page generation is through
PHP
;
JpGraph
package for chart generation (also under PHP).
This is just the start, both the amount of data as well as the functionality of the site are intended to grow quickly during the coming months. Proposals and ideas from any side are welcome.
Klaus Jacobi
AHT GROUP AG