Re: An Elephant is Faithful 100%

Hyperic would be happy to donate licenses of HQ for them to monitor  
and manage their setup. Please let me know what they need and if  
they're interested.

-javier
___________________________________
Javier Soltero
Hyperic                  |  www.hyperic.net
o- 415 738 2566  |  c- 415 305 8733
javier.soltero@hyperic.net
___________________________________

On Nov 18, 2005, at 1:15 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:

> Folks,
>
> I recently received the following appeal from the African Elephant  
> Database.
> They need help migrating to PostGIS and building out their  
> application.
>
> I, personally, cannot imagine a more compelling project which  
> deserves the
> PostgreSQL community's collective help.   The elephant is our  
> mascot!   Plus
> the AED folks introduced the idea of making this a general OSS  
> project for
> species conservation databases.
>
> Who's available?
>
> ---------------------------
> I'm writing with to explore the possiblity of a collaboration between
> Postgresql, PostGIS and the African Elephant Database (AED) of the  
> IUCN/SSC
> African Elephant Specialist Group (AfESG). Please allow me to begin by
> giving you a little background on all those acronyms, in reverse  
> order.
>
> The AfESG is a group of elephant experts from across the African  
> continent
> who, aside from their daily jobs, disinterestedly lend their skills to
> provide technical advice on elephant conservation and management. The
> mission of the AfESG is to promote the long-term conservation of  
> African
> elephants throughout their range, and the group focuses its efforts on
> capacity building, alleviation of human-elephant conflict,  
> compilation and
> dissemination of technical information, and the development of  
> elephant
> conservation strategies. Led by a volunteer chair, the AfESG has a  
> small
> secretariat in Nairobi, Kenya. Please see http://iucn.org/afesg/ for
> details.
>
> The AfESG is one of the most active of over 120 Specialist Groups  
> of the
> IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC). The largest conservation  
> grouping in
> the world, the SSC is a worldwide network of over 7,000 volunteer  
> experts
> working to conserve the diversity of species found on Earth. The  
> SSC is
> responsible for the production of the IUCN Red List of Threatened  
> Species.
> See http://iucn.org/themes/ssc and http://www.redlist.org.
>
> The SSC is the largest of the six commissions of IUCN - The World
> Conservation Union. IUCN is the world's largest and most important
> conservation network. The Union brings together 82 States, 111  
> government
> agencies, more than 800 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and  
> some
> 10,000 scientists and experts from 181 countries in a unique worldwide
> partnership. IUCN's mission is to influence, encourage and assist  
> societies
> throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of  
> nature and
> to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and  
> ecologically
> sustainable. The World Conservation Union was founded in October 1948
> following an international conference in Fontainebleau, France.  
> IUCN HQ is
> in Gland, Switzerland. See http://iucn.org/.
>
> The African Elephant Database
> The AED is a geographical information (GIS) system used to maintain an
> accurate and up-to-date record on the distribution and abundance of  
> African
> Elephants. The AED is regularly updated, with data on elephant  
> range and
> numbers constantly being solicited from wildlife authorities and  
> experts
> across the continent, and a major report is produced every three  
> years and
> made available in the AfESG website (see http://iucn.org/afesg/aed/).
>
> The AED currently runs in ESRI ArcGIS 9.1., in a personal  
> geodatabase (MS
> Access) format. We obtained ArcInfo through one of ESRI's conservation
> program grants - but soon we were being asked to pay for  
> maintenance charges
> in excess of USD3,000 per annum. Despite these costs, we are  
> considerably
> constrained by the limitations of the set-up - including the MS  
> Access 2Gb
> size limit. If we were to upgrade our configuration to a full  
> geodatabase
> would involve acquiring ESRI's Spatial Database Engine (SDE) plus a
> commercial RDBMS such as Oracle, DB2 or MS SQL server, at a one-off  
> cost of
> several thousand dollars and annual maintenance fees to match.
>
> Such costs are well beyond our reach, we are hoping to build a more
> sustainable solution using open source software. Although  
> opensource GIS has
> not evolved as much or as quickly as opensource relational  
> databases, we do
> have some hopes that a suitable system could be developed to  
> maintain the
> AED. The AED is the most comprehensive species database in  
> existence, and we
> believe there would be value in developing a turnkey solution that  
> can be
> used to maintain monitoring information on other species for which  
> there are
> relatively good data.
>
> We've got the elephant and the database in common. If you think a
> collaboration could be productive and mutually beneficial, please  
> let me
> know so that we can begin to explore the options.
>
> I look forward to hearing from you.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Julian Blanc
> Manager, African Elephant Database
> IUCN/SSC African Elephant Specialist Group
> Email: julian.blanc@iucn.org
> Web: http://iucn.org/afesg/
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> -- 
> Josh Berkus
> Aglio Database Solutions
> San Francisco
>
> ---------------------------(end of  
> broadcast)---------------------------
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