GeoCafe:an online information tool and interactive map service for the specialty coffee market

摘要

In this article, written for CSC/ by Eric van Praag of the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) centre at the US Geological Survey (USGS), we take a second look at the work that the EROS, the Tropical Centre for Agricultural Research and Education (CATIE), and national coffee agencies in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Costa Rica are doing on viewing, manipulating, and searching coffee data with the help of interactive map services. The GeoCafe project is part of the USAID-funded Quality Coffee Programme (QCP), an initiative currently assisting the specialty coffee sectors in Central America and the Dominican Republic to recover from the recent coffee crisis. The GeoCafe project is developing innovative online knowledge and information tools in support of coffee production, certification, and marketing. The applications developed include internet map services that provide access to a rich variety of information on coffee farms, cooperatives, mills, roasters, and associated spatialdata. Users don't need special software to access and use the GeoCafe tools -they can view, overlay, and query datasets of coffee-related information on-line (more information on this project is available at http://edcintl.cr.usgs.gov/geocafe (select online maps to view the interactive maps).