Exactly one year and week ago on 22nd June 2011, Virtual Kenya was launched. It's been an exciting year full of varied experiences that have been quite enriching, outreach campaign to schools, universities and colleges that culminated in winners walking away with exciting prizes to training and workshops to professionals and government policy makers to even a presentation of the platform to H.E. Mwai Kibaki during the K.O.D.I. launch.
The platform has grown in leaps and bounds not only in number of users, but also in upgrades of existing layers and uploading of much more data to increased functionality and added features that are bound to make user experience even better than has been in the past.
The Virtual Kenya team has been hard at work, implementing some new features that is bound to enrich the overall experience of using the site. From a new geonode instance to exciting new layers borne of fruitful partnerships to new dashboards and mashups just to name a few.We are so proud to be part of this great initiative as this and continue making spatia data accessible and promote new ways of how to make this data meaningful to all.
We are always striving to keep abreast of the latest advancements and it's in this spirit that we upgraded our instance to improve user experience in speed of loading and with a PostGIS geodatabase. Users will be in for quite a treat with the upgraded instance as it faster and much more intuitive.Try it for yourself to experience this change.
2) New Sub-Domain : The new sub domain is now live where layers and maps can be viewed, saved and downloaded via the latest geonode instance
3) New Layers
K.O.D.I. : In partnership with Open Data Intiative we were able to create new layers as a results of joins between existing layers in Virtual Kenya and what has been provided by K.O.D.I. and the result has been county level layers hosted on the new geonode instance as follows :
- Household Access to Sanitation
- Household Access to Water
- CDF projects
- Traffic Incidences
- Primary Schools
We have also been able uploaded data from WRI and ILRI on the LAPSSET corridor and viewers can access it via the new instance
4) New Existing Tab for Mashups and Dashboard
From various including K.O.D.I. we have created County-based mashups and dashboards where users can query and compare data based on different themes among the various Counties and get a better understanding where each County stands in comparison to the others in their areas of interest.
Just goes to show there's no limit when it comes to application of spatial data and when we open it up and make it more accessible what a powerful influence it's likely to have
