Slashgeo

With the success of KIDS in Asia, and the increasing demands for thematic information systems and indicator mapping web applications, serving every sector from agriculture to human and animal health, fisheries, environmental monitoring and administration, the scope of KIDS grew from being a web application to becoming a framework. This new and grand vision for KIDS, to link indicator data from a variety of sources at the global levels, to create an information exchange network, and a set of tools to analyze that information, required the combined efforts of experts from various disciplines and a community of practice to implement. Thus KIDS became an open source project, and released under the GNU public license, invited input and collaboration from all interested parties.

Although originally intended as a tool for thematic mapping and temporal and spatial analysis of indicator data, a main strength of KIDS has been its ability to handle multi-dimensional indicator data, without restrictions on the number of dimensions. In addition, KIDS has been tuned and tested for navigating massive datasets and detailed vector and raster graphic formats. Importing data and graphics from a wide variety of sources and types is also made easy with a smart and fully functional interface that allows the user to assemble their entire project online, and to see their data spatially mapped, or in tabular format, or in temporal, pie, or bar charts.

KIDS, as it stand today, is actively and completely maintained by a community of experts, who are committed to support and enhance the product, and to keep it opensource and free. These experts bring a wide array of knowledge and creativity to the challenging problems in thematic mapping and the management of the ever increasing indicator data. On our team we have experts in GIS, data-mining, human computer interaction, quality control, as well as translators, statisticians, system administrators and programmers. This group is geographically spread across the globe in Italy, USA, Brazil, Australia, Thailand, UK, Czech Republic, Philippines, Namibia, Peru, India, Botswana, Switzerland, China and Syria, just to name a few. The list is growing daily, and we are always looking for more people to join the team and adopt the product, as end-users, developers, testers or visionaries, and to contribute to KIDS to grow and evolve.

Currently, the KIDS community is working on the roadmap for the next release of KIDS, version 3. Some of the goals included in this roadmap include:

• Tight integration with statistical analysis and geographic warehousing systems.
• Multilingualization, from data to presentation level.
• Search engine to search thematic data and metadata.
• Re-architecture of KIDS as an application server; a container for thematic application.
• A standard database schema for multidimensional indicator data and metadata.
• Compliance with industry standards for statistical data, metadata, and labeling geographic layers and boundaries.
• Training trainers to hold instructional demos, and create training material for individual study and practice.

To learn more about the KIDS project, and to download a fully functional, unbranded, royalty free version of the product, along with all the source code, visit our website at http://kids.fao.org/