Today, in countries all across the world, fairs and expos were held to educate the public about Geographical Information Systems, and all the things these systems do that you might not be aware of. 7News visited the annual EXPO here in Belize City and learnt about the useful program.
This morning students, educators, and the general public from all over the country crammed into a room at the Ramada Hotel to attend a fair highlighting the great benefits that the Geographic Information System has to offer. The name sounds complex but it is actually a pretty basic system that has made life easier for many companies and people all around the world. How does it do that? Well, one of the GIS experts told us exactly how.
Loretta Palacio - TBSL Managing Director
“GIS has the geographic component and it allows you to create analysis to research information and to see patterns, trends, and relationships so for example when we are looking at the population of Belize and you are looking at a numeration district like from the SIB (they have a booth here as well), you can see where the people who are between the age of 50 to 70 years old are living. And you could drill down and say let me see how many female and how many male. And so if you are a business and you want to put up some kind of business that is relating to that age group may be an older peoples home or whatever it is, maybe a tennis shoe store for young people then you say oh this area has a high concentration of young people.â€
The fair had several booths with different companies, organizations, and even a school that uses GIS as an integral moving part of the work they do. Belize Electricity Limited was one of the exhibitors and they demonstrated how they use GIS to run everyday tasks that were once tedious without the magical GIS
Robert Hernandez - GIS Technician
“This is what our guys are using in the field right now and this is used to collect information about our power lines and basically our distribution system to run maintenance and what not, so they would then go out in the field with this device and they would collect information using the tablet. They could collect information on anything, poles, lines which would come back to us we fix it up and send it to the guys upstairs. Or we get to the point where we can even distribute the information to customers and we can say, alright, there is an outage happening in your area, this is the area. Or, especially when it comes to system expansion we have a lot of that going on so we can tell the guys upstairs this where you need to expand this is where you need to focus.â€
Now if you thought B.E.L was impressive the genius work of a few students from Ocean Academy in Caye Caulker is even better. They use GIS to as a manatee detector and to develop solutions to save the lives of our precious manatees. They were more than happy to exhibit their hard and important work:
Fabian Green - Ocean Academy
“ GIS helps us to map out where manatees have been injured or also where people spot manatees while doing tours or different activities so we collect data and information to place in the map to find out where the manatees have been injured or where the manatees have been spot in Belize.â€
Jaheem - Ocean Academy
“We created four solutions one of them was to employ rangers from Belize Port Authority, the second one was to do more signage which we would place in no wake zone and Our third solution was to create brochures using this GIS system we created.â€
This is Belize’s 6th annual GIS expo. They hope to eventually integrate GIS into school curriculums.
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