Track: Environmental Management
Establishing a National Soil Information System (NSIS) for Egypt
Waleed A. EffatAhmed A. Talaat
This system has been implemented by the Regional Observation Center (ROC) for the Soil, Water and Environment Research Institute (SWERI) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation. This system aims at introducing the capabilities of geographic information systems to serve the functionality of SWERI in order to increase its efficiency and level of performance. Accordingly, the final outcome of such a practice is a user-friendly system capable of performing the required functions and producing the required outputs of SWERI. This would in turn improve and increase the efficiency of SWERI in the area of handling, archiving, retrieving, manipulating, and analyzing the soil-related data and information that will be introduced into the database. The system also allows the technical staff of SWERI to perform functions that were not previously feasible due to many reasons such as volume of data, storing conditions, duration of storage, and accordingly the condition of data especially in the case of maps, etc., that naturally results from classical storage methods and handling of paper copies of reports or maps. Above all, the system acts as an indispensable decision support tool. It provides the kind and types of information that are needed for decision makers in a timely manner and in the most appropriate format. NSIS is developed using ArcInfo Version 7.0.3 to run on a UNIX workstation.
Waleed A. Effat
Regional Observation Center (ROC)
4b Takseem Asmaa Fahmi,El-Nozha St.,
P.O.Box 160 Panorama October
Heliopolis, CAIRO
EGYPT
Telephone: 20-2-2906151
Fax: 20-2-2901196
E-mail: weffat@hotmail.com