POIMapping Mt. Apo
By Angelo Hernan E. Melencio, UPLB Mountaineers (Batch 16)
Last February 14, I celebrated my 10th year as a mountaineer by climbing Mt. Apo, the country’s highest mountain (2,956 MASL, according to www.pinoymountaineer.com). Mountaineers Jerry Villanueva and Emil Paz, both also members of Plan PHL’s emergency response teams (ERTs) in Compostela Valley and Davao Oriental, joined the adventure.
During climbs, I usually take videos using my point-and-shoot Pentax W90, play around with the clips using Cyberlink Powerdirector 9, borrow music from various artists, and then upload them in YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/angelomelencio). But this time, I opted to try something different and more relevant.
Earlier this month, Plan International’s ICT guys from the Country Office and Asia Regional Office introduced us to an android app called “POIMapper”. As part of their ICT for Development (ICT4D), particularly the “Interactive Community Mapping”, they are trying to incorporate information technology to improve our emergency response efforts for children and families severely affected by Typhoon Bopha (local name: Pablo).
The POIMapper, or Point-of-Interest Mapper, is an application installed in an android device where you could collect data on-site or on the field and share the data immediately to the people and your colleagues. The data is presented on a map where your coordinates are automatically plotted so that others may see where you took the data. According to Google Play, it is “suitable for several sectors such as mobile GIS, mhealth, mobile surveys, humanitarian & development, forest & agricultural, environmental data collection and mobile enterprise”. For more information, visit www.poimapper.com.
For the purpose of field-testing the app’s efficiency and reliability, I designed a basic POIMapper form which may be used to take a photo, the coordinates, and a brief description. I named the form “Pin a Photo” because of the idea of having a map on the wall where you could pin a photo to show an event or an activity that happened in a certain point on the map.
I used the form when we traversed Mt. Apo via Kapatagan to Kidapawan trails. Here is a map to show the points (30 points in total):
Here is an interactive map where you would be able to see the description of each point by clicking on it: http://bit.ly/YlghwU. After some trial and error, I was able to transfer the data from POIMapper to ArcGIS Online but I wasn’t successful in including the photos in the map. Each point should show a photo.
Anyway, pictures of our climb are uploaded here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151359366804877.497779.753484876&type=1 .
RED TORPEDO 