What is Mappermaker?
Mappermaker is a tool for spreading the benefits of GIS technology. Mappermaker lets you translate the interface text of the excellent Quantum GIS software package into any language, in any alphabet or script system. Mappermaker then creates a file which you download and then unzip onto one or more USB thumb-drives. One of these drives can then be inserted into any computer that is running Windows, and the translated GIS program is available for use without any further installation.
What is GIS?
It stands for geographic information system. It's computerized cartography and map-analysis, and it's what corporations use to determine where to place new stores, what police departments use to identify high-crime areas, and what community activists use to document and plan the futures of their neighborhoods. GIS is a technological revolution that's swept corporations, governments, and large nonprofits. Mappermaker exists to expand that revolution to include the grassroots.
What's wrong with commercial GIS?
Commercial GIS is great, but it's not for everyone. It's expensive, it's intimidating, and it's in English. Those three things mean that in many settings, only institutions that have plenty of power and prestige can acquire the software and the training, whether by buying it or by attracting donations. Where does that leave the small-scale community activist? The villager? The hobbyist? There's a sophisticated and growing community building free, open-source alternatives to commercial GIS. Mappermaker is here to take one of these alternatives to places where the open-source software movement hasn't yet reached.
So how does one of these "villagers" use Mappermaker?
Mappermaker isn't intended for direct use by the target user. Mappermaker is for people and institutions that want to distribute GIS technology among communities that don't otherwise have access to it. A typical Mappermaker user is a community-development organization setting out on a participatory-GIS exercise. This organization has access to computers, translators, and training programs. All they lack is free, translated GIS software.
How many phrases must I translate?
QGIS actually has thousands of terms and phrases. Mappermaker lets you translte just the 300 or so most important. (In later versions of Mappermaker, you'll be able to translate all of them.)
That's still a lot of translating!
You can start a translation, save it, and then edit or add to it at a later time. If you generate a GIS distribution with an incomplete set of translated terms, the resulting GIS will use the terms you did translate and use English for the rest. No biggie.
I read English. Can I use Mappermaker for myself?
Yes. You don't have to use the translation feature. Mappermaker will give you a thumbdrive-portable distribution of QGIS, and it'll run perfectly well in its original English.
What's QGIS? Quantum GIS, or QGIS, is a free, open-source GIS package. It does an excellent job of displaying maps in all the standard formats, and reprojecting them so that they can be viewed in overlay. Importantly for the cause of GIS democratization, QGIS is easily customized and translated.
The distribution only works in Windows?
Yes, sorry.
Does the distribution come with training material or sample data?
Not yet, but that's all in the works.
Who's behind all this?
Hundreds of people are behind QGIS, Mappermaker was developed by computational ecologist and open-source dabler Ted Wong. Email Ted at tgwong at gmail dot com.
Mappermaker is funded by a USFWS grant to Shermin de Silva, a behavioral ecologist and conservation biologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
