When you spend time in Africa you realize immediately that the use mobile phones for SMS is huge. In the big cities just about everyone has a phone. Even in rural areas, most farmers use mobile phones regularly. Applications such as FrontlineSMS and RapidSMS have made it relatively easy for NGOs and others working in Africa to setup and deploy SMS broadcast to provide a variety of services.
At AGCommons we’ve been thinking alot about how to provide text based output from geographic information. Maps on phones typically don’t work in Africa where 3G coverage is spotty and most phones are only capable of calls and text. And in order to return location based information there needs to be some way of knowing approximately where the caller is located.
One possible solution isto use have the user to enter the name the village or province they are in. Another way is to have users identify their location when they register for the service. On the server we can use the location information to parse commands making it relatively simple to perform geographic queries on the AGCommons layers.
As we move forward with developing the platform we hope to bake in some simple functionality to an early release. As the AGCommons platform grows, the service and available information will grow along with it.
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