As the premier academic Geomatics conference in Southern Africa, the AfricaGEO2014 Conference held in July at the Cape Town International Convention Centrefollowed the strong tradition of excellence of its predecessor CONSAS conferences.

The expansion of the Geomatics industry is reflected in the diversity of the academic and industry papers submitted. With four parallel sessions it was possible to cover a number of broad fields of interest including: 1) cadastres and land tenure 2) technology, engineering, precise surveying, mine surveying and scanning 3) GIS, SDI, data management 4) remote sensing and photogrammetry, 5) geodesy and 6) education and professional aspects. It is our great pleasure to make these papers available to you in this set of online proceedings.

In order to cater for the academic need to publish peer-reviewed papers, and the industry need to showcase innovations in practice, the submissions for the conference followed two tracks: the academic track and the industry track.

The academic track was aimed at papers which describe academic research relevant to the conference theme. Full papers were submitted for double blind academic peer-review by two reviewers each. Acceptance of papers was judged on the basis of originality, significance, relevance, correctness and clarity. Peer-reviewed papers are identified by “peer-reviewed paper” in the programme as well as “This paper has been through a process of double-blind peer review” after the authors’ names and before the paper abstract in the paper download. Of 35 papers submitted, 22 were accepted as peer-reviewed papers. The Technical Directors are very grateful to the reviewers for the time they invested in reviewing and the exceptionally high standard of the reviews. Please see the list of reviewers under “Scientific Committee” below.

The industry track was aimed at papers that describe interesting and relevant Geomatics industry projects. Acceptance of abstracts was judged on the basis of significance, relevance, correctness, originality and clarity. Full papers were not reviewed. Some industry track full papers were not submitted in time for the proceedings and so these papers do not form part of this publication.

AfricaGEO’s growing relevance to Africa is reflected in the number of papers that have been submitted by academics and practitioners on the continent. Although the majority of papers come from within South Africa, there is a growing African contribution and we hope that this trend continues in future. Africa’s much-prophesied economic growth is starting to be seen in a number of countries, and the concomitant benefits to the Geomatics industry can be observed in some of the research and innovation reported on in these proceedings.

We thank all authors, presenters and reviewers for their involvement in the technical programme and making this a conference of quality and an event which promotes “Developing Geomatics for Africa”.

Copyright:

Authors retain copyright over their work published in these online-proceedings under a Creative Commons Attribution License. This allows others to freely access, use, and share the work, with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and its initial publication in this proceedings. Authors are encouraged to post and share their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) at any point after publication in these proceedings.

Reference papers in these proceedings as follows:

Author 1, author 2, 2014, Paper title, Whittal, J.,  Motala, S. (Eds) AfricaGEO 2014: Proceedings of the Second AfricaGEO Conference, 1-3 July, Cape Town, South Africa.

If you have any questions or comments about these proceedings, please feel free to contact us using the email addresses below.

Associate Professor Jennifer Whittal

Mr Siddique Motala