Duke students will be in Muhuru Bay, Kenya over the summer of 2009 in conjunction with with the Duke Wiser program. Part of their work involves helping the residents of Muhuru Bay create a map of their home. Maps will include water locations, health clinics, popular hangouts, and the paths that people take to arrive at these locations. When combined with GPS data, these maps can be studied and used to help prevent the spread of HIV, determine the optimal location for a water pump, or simply plan out roads and paths.

GeoEye is the worlds largest space imaging corporation. GeoEye uses four different satellites (IKONOS, ORBVIEW-2, ORBVIEW-3 and GeoEye-1) and two planes to capture satellite and arial photographs from almost anywhere in the planet. GeoEye's most advanced imagery product, GeoEye-1, has a resolution of .41-meters (.50-meters for commercial customers). This sub-meter ground resolution imagery discerns an object on the ground approximately 16 inches in size using both multispectral imagery and panchromatic imagery. Through GeoEye, customers are able to order the highest-quality commercial images anywhere on the globe.

ISISmapping has ordered a GeoEye image from the newest satellite, GeoEye-1, for Muhuru Bay and the surrounding area which is set to arrive in June 2009. In the future the ISISmapping group and users of the ISISmapping toolkit will be able to order GeoEye images and use them in collectiong data. GeoEye images come linked with GPS data which ISISmapping hopes to integrate into the website through GIS software such as ESRI's ArcGIS.

ArcGIS by ESRI is an integrated collection of GIS software products that provides a standards-based platform for spatial analysis, data management, and mapping. ArcGIS is scalable and can be integrated with other enterprise systems such as work order management, business intelligence, and executive dashboards. ArcGIS is one of the main tools used by both private and public firms for a multitude of purposes relating to mapping and GIS enabled data.

ISISmapping plans to use ArcGIS to integrate the incoming GeoEye map into the ISISmapping website. ISISmapping hopes to analyze the map of Muhuru Bay Kenya using ArcGIS by geotagging dwellings and important landmarks at our base in Durham. Once these landmarks are tagged randlomly selected dwellings' GPS information will be sent to a Nokia N95 which will then be sent into the field to collect survey GPS enabled survey data. Once this data is entered into the Nokia N95 it can then be sent back to the base in Durham where it will be visualized using ArcGIS and created into maps showing key demographic and health related information which can then be distributed as maps to local are leaders and researchers. Preliminary studies have shown this method of collecting survey data to be more accurate and easy to obtain once the system has been set up.

For more information on how ISISmapping plans on using ArcGIS to collect and visualize survey data please click here.