Page 26 - University of Pretoria Research Review 2017

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Addressing geospatial information challenges
Serena Coetzee, Centre for Geoinformation Science, Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology
Addresses play a vital role in society. They are used for city management, service delivery, emergency response and elections, or to navigate the way around and find friends. Yet many urban informal settlements and rural areas in developing countries are without an address infrastructure, which poses particular challenges.
In the case of an emergency, epidemic or a disaster, a lack of addresses can result in essential assistance or humanitarian aid arriving too late. Apart from serving pressing day-to-day needs and those that manifest under extreme circumstances, geographic information is increasingly used to monitor service delivery, such as health and education, or progress towards achieving goals set for development. Geospatial planning and information management have therefore become integral to what has become an interconnected world.
In informal settlements on the urban fringes of today’s burgeoning cities, dwellings are scattered or clustered
randomly and, where address numbers exist, they
are often assigned in no particular order. Informal settlements are also fluid, so that today’s sequential address numbering may be ‘scrambled’ tomorrow. Similarly, many rural areas in Africa are without an address infrastructure: instead of street names or house numbers, an intricate web of footpaths connect dwellings. Paved roads may connect villages and have road names, but smaller roads are nameless.
Researchers and postgraduate students in the Centre for Geoinformation Science (CGIS) at UP, led by Associate Professor Serena Coetzee, have been exploring possible solutions to address challenges.
In augmented reality, computer-generated information can be superimposed onto a live view of the real world. In 2017, CGIS developed such a prototype app that displayed addresses on a smartphone, and tested this
A house in the Alaska settlement, Mamelodi, South Africa.
Serena Coetzee