Using MADE

The Africover software suite includes tools to produce and maintain the data base as well as software to use it and fully liberate the information stored through the LCCS system.

Currently the software designed to use the data base are under development; in the meanwhile a procedure and tools have been developed to offer to the user the opportunity to interact with the data base and customize the data on the base of their needs. See the data distribution section to discover the data base products distributed by Africover.

ADG (Africover Data-base Gateway) and AID (Africover Interactive Data-base) are software aimed to enhance either the use and the updating of the Africover product by end users.

ADG

ADG: Africover Database Gateway. It will be a cross-cutting interrogation software through which the database can be addressed according to the individual end-user requirements; its main function will be to allow an easy and fast recombination of the land cover polygons, not only by class name, as usual in normal GIS, but also by classifiers. The end-users will be able to create their own classes using the set of existing classifiers by selectively recombining the database polygons.

AID

AID: Africover Interactive Database for interpretation. It will be an interactive software to guide and homogenize the land cover interpretation. Selected portions of different types of images, ground truth data and ancillary data will be organized in a logical, interactive way to guide the user in the identification of the variety of different land cover types existing in Africa.

Understanding public domain land cover data sets:
spatial vs thematic aggregation

FAO Africover distributes a public domain spatially aggregated version of the full resolution land cover data set.

The thematic content of the spatially aggregated data set is very similar to the original data set:the aggregation is performed at a spatial level setting a threshold under which the polygons are dissolved in the polygons containing them.

The public domain spatially aggregated data set retains the full power of the original data set: you can exploit all the power of the LCCS coding to perform complex queries and you can re-aggregate the data thematically to extract exactly the information you need.

Africover also provides some thematic aggregations designed to answer the information requirements of most users.

To discover how to access the different Africover products see the data dissemination scheme.