[Ottawa_users] A GIS from Cuba..

[Frank Warmerdam]

Omar Fernández wrote:
> Greetings:
> 
> My name's Omar, I'm webmaster of the Medical University of Santiago de Cuba,
> Cuba. it's a little island in the caribbean sea.  

Omar,

I assure you Cuba is well known!

 > My purpose is contact to
> you  becouse I have programmed  a Geographical System Information (GIS)
> directed to solve some problems about epidemiology and diseases fom my town.
> I think someone maybe help me. I need to exchange experience about it and
> I'd like participate in some kind event, workshop or curse for learn and
> show my work. 

Interesting.  I did some work with DM Solutions for CIET related to
epidemiology.  The work was the development of CIETMap, a desktop gis
application built on OpenEV's core with various Epidemiology things
built in.  I don't think CIETMap was free, but CIET is an NGO and I
think provides it to other organizations for very reasonable prices.
Perhaps free in some cases.

   http://ciet.org/en/

I believe Mario Beauchamp (starged at gmail.com) is still working on
this for CIET.  It might be interesting to get in contact with him.

 > Actually I'm member of ottawa_users at lists.osgeo.org.

This list is mainly aimed at folks in the Ottawa region, though there is
no harm in anyone being on it.  But you might find a more general audience
to discuss open source gis at the OSGeo main discuss list.  You can find it
off the OSGeo page at http://www.osgeo.org/.

 > I have
> about 13 years programming, moreover I'm geophysical. I have programmed it
> using principally PHP,JavaScript and MySQL  but i'm programming other
> modules in CGI, becouse I need to do some script with C++. The GIS in the
> world are very dear, and.. our country is very poor for get it.

I'm not sure of the details of what you are trying to build, but you might
want to learn more about GRASS, a very powerful and free GIS system.  For
web mapping PHP environments like Chameleon, and Mapbender on top of MapServer
might be of interest.  No doubt your project requires quite a bit of custom
development, but it might well be that some of these existing platforms
could save you a huge amount of effort so you can focus on developing the
parts unique to your situation.

I think Cuba is a natural for open source, given a relatively well educated
populace, a "communal effort" ethic, and relatively little hard currency.

If you can arrange it, you might want to attend the FOSS4G conference in
Victoria Canada this coming fall.  It would be a great opportunity to
connect with many like minded folks - though I must admit that Epidemiology
has not figured high among applications in previous years.

   http://www.foss4g2007.org/

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org