Agileworks, a company at The Innovation Hub, has recently grabbed the attention of representatives of both local and national government levels. Their professional ArcIMS GIS client, GiX, was purchased by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality in Port Elizabeth, while the National Department of Water Affairs awarded the company the contract to develop the National Fire Risk Rating system as prototyped by the CSIR.
GiX Professional is an advanced cross platform GIS viewer with features like red lining, high quality Internet plotting, and a small footprint - the installation is a mere 3.5MB download. GiX provides a GIS experience far richer than browser based systems and its straightforward approach to GIS allows an organisation to leverage the huge investment in GIS data with minimal training of staff.
GiX leverages the advanced capabilities of ESRI ArcIMS and allows users to add bookmarks, share annotation and PDF reports, enabling the easy sharing of data in Office.
Agileworks was approached by the CSIR, Department of Water Affairs and South African Weather Services (SAWS) to help them develop and roll-out the National Fire Risk Rating system, which forms part of the new legislation to curb veldt fires.
The system is built on the US-developed Fire Family Plus engine and incorporates research and heuristics developed by the CSIR to predict the fire risk rating from burn indices. The engine is designed to read the latest weather forecasts received from SAWS, then automatically run the models and publish the results so that decision-makers can quantify the fire hazard in an area, enabling them to issue warnings and pass resolutions to minimise risk and save lives.
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