SEMA stands for Sensors, Empowerment and Accountability in Tanzania. It's a research programme spearheaded by ITC in which
the overall research question is :
To what extent can ordinary citizens in Tanzania directly exact accountability from water and public health providers with the human sensor web ?
The Hackathon
The hackathon was organized as a first step in identifying software solutions to be used and developed further in the course of the programme.
The 20+ participants were drawn majorly from 2 Dar es Salaam universities and developers from Tanzania and Upande, Kenya.
The venue was at COSTECH, the Tanzanian i-Hub equivalent.
Challenge : Geospatial Interoperability
The challenge put forward was how can data from a running citizen reporting platform could be used by other web applications/mashups. The solution built is a web map application that consumed data from the online Human Sensor Web sensor observation service. HSW was chosen due to it's relevance, however, Ushahidi and Taarifa(ushahidi spinoff) instances can also have web clients accessing their data through their APIs.
The core of the application was the OpenLayers javascript library which provides a class to overlay an SOS layer on top of a map. Custom methods had to be coded for submitting requests to the Sensor Observation Service and processing the responses. The interface was built solely around Extjs.
