Geopublisher trainings in Africa

Since December 2009, partners of the University of Abomey-Calavi (Benin) and the Secrétariat d'Etat Chargé de l'Eau et de l'Environnement / كتابة الدولة الـمكلفة بالـماء والبيئة (Morocco) were recurrently trained in the use of Geopublisher in Bonn, Germany. The trainings were held within the scope of the “train-the trainer” program (“formation de formateur”) of the IMPETUS project (Integrated Approach to the Efficient Management of Scarce Water Resources in West Africa).

In 2010, the project partners in turn gave several courses on the publication of maps with Geopublisher at local institutions, such as the Beninese Ecole Doctorale Pluridisciplinaire, CIFRED and other graduate schools and faculties (FSA, FAST/CIPMA) of the Université d’Abomey-Calavi (Benin) or the Université Ibn Zohr (Morocco).

During the courses, the general idea of multi-language publishing of maps on DVDs and in the Internet was explained. Each student created his own atlas based on the geo-data from the digital IMPETUS Atlas using Geopublisher. Topics were:

• Create a multi-language atlas
• Add ESRI Shapefiles, raster-images and PDFs to one's own atlas
• Define maps using the pool of data
• Style maps (AtlasStyler) and describe layers and maps in each language
• Export the atlas

More courses are already planned for 2011. The Geopublisher development team got a lot of valuable feedback and feature-requests, which have been gradually realized in new versions of Geopublisher. Ask on the Geopublishing mailinglist or contact us if you are interested in tranings for your project or staff.