Following the launch of the new Letsema Mapping Interface, I thought I’d write a little about how it works and how Letsema are hoping it will benefit them.

“The Letsema initiative is committed to fostering co-operation, collaboration and communication between all funders and aid providers in Lesotho”

Using a combination of geographic coordinates, overlay images and a filtering system we have taken advantage of the Google Maps API to create a map pinpointing the location of organisations and amenities in Lesotho.

Here’s an image of the map with everything (so far) switched on:

The filter system allows the user to toggle the visibility of the organisations/amenites. It also doubles up as the maps legend:

Each filter type can be expanded, showing all of the individual places under that heading. These can then be clicked and the map will zoom to the respective location:

New organisations who wish to provide aid in Lesotho can use this map to work out where their aid may have the greatest impact. The aim is to work out where there is an imbalance between town/village populations and the density of organisations.

Feel free to give it a try at: http://www.letsema.org/html/atlas.php

e! Science News is a revolutionary website where absolutely everything is fully automated by harvesting content from other websites RSS feeds, article tags, reciprocal links, and no doubt many other techniques: http://esciencenews.com/

At the fully automated extreme it’s a fairly niche idea (as most organisations will want at least some control over their content), however it could certainly be a powerful framework to use for a single section of a website.

Here’s a little more information on how it works: http://esciencenews.com/about