Online Africa Map from Harvard University

This project attempts to address a basic problem for all scholarship on Africa that treats where things happen as necessary to understanding how and why they happen: finding places on a map. Despite the existence of excellent public maps for Africa, to date there is no common source that allows students, researchers, and the general public to:

1. Interact with the best available public data for Africa
2. See the whole of Africa yet also zoom in to particular places
3. Accumulate both contemporary and historical data supplied by researchers and make it permanently accessible online
4. Work collaboratively across disciplines and organizations with spatial information about Africa in an online environment

The AfricaMap project aims to accomplish these goals in stages, with public and private support. It draws on the basic insight of geographic information systems that spatiotemporal data becomes more meaningful as more "layers" are added, and makes use of tiling and indexing approaches to facilitate rapid search and visualization of large volumes of disparate data.

AfricaMap aims to augment existing initiatives for globally sharing spatial data and technology such as GSDI (Global Spatial Data Infrastructure). AfricaMap makes use of OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) compliant web services such as WMS (Web Map Service), emerging open standards such as WMS-C (cached WMS), and standards-based metadata formats, to enable AfricaMap data layers to be inserted into existing data infrastructures. 

All AfricaMap source code will be made available as Open Source for others to use and improve upon.

Above excerpt is from: http://about.africamap.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k28501&pageid=icb.page125848

The Africa Map can be visited here: http://worldmap.harvard.edu/africamap/