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Welcome to BizGEO Project!

BizGEO is a platform developed to support simple geographical-data capturing, storing and sharing. BizGEO platform is intended to provide a very simple interface, which requires little knowledge of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to get involved in data collection processes. BizGEO is integrated with the standard open source map server (GeoServer) to form an integrated GIS data collection suite. BizGEO is made up of three main components; BizGEOServer which is a facility for managing and planning data collection by organizing data in projects; BizGEOApp, a mobile application which is used by field users to collect data through a set of defined forms; and GeoServer which manages and publishes the data using open standards.

Why BizGEO?
BizGEO is intended to bridge the gap between Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and people. As more data analysis starts to depend on location information, there is a need to facilitate public access to geographical data. We can get more geographical data, quickly and accurately, if everyone of us is able to participate in the data collection process. Similar to how we are able to develop a blog online. To get everyone participating in the process and building location based systems, we first need to be able to understand what issues we are tackling and secondly, we need simple tools in place to support our mission. BizGEO is such tool. BizGEO breaks GIS down into simple terms, and offers a manageable platform to support our missions and ideas.

Motivation
Geographical data collection is still an expensive and resource intensive process despite recent technological advancement. Mobile technology has grown extremely fast in the past few years. Devices have become much more powerful over time, with features which were inconceivable a decade ago. Right now it is common for a smart phone or tablet to be equipped with highly accurate GPS hardware, a high resolution camera with 4G lte. Data prices have gone down tremendously, which has made it possible to transfer and share data easily and fast. We have also realized that increasingly, data analysis requires geographical information to complete, and provide meaningful information to the users. With this data demand, and challenges to access required geographical data, we need to find ways to use existing technology, and capacitate everyone to collect the data they need. We need to make the process of collecting geographical information easier, and, as a result, making geographical data open and accessible.

BizGEO Server stack

The wiki uses Markdown syntax.

Project Members:

• Michael Tarimo (admin)