Educational

South African GIS Snails database

The official South African Snails database was previously only available on more than 17,000 handwritten cards dating back as far as 1950. The information on these cards were collected from areas all over the country by qualified field workers. Such a large card-based collection is simply inaccessible to many snail researchers.

The GIS module displays the result of the query builder on a map of South Africa. Nearly all queries are location based and the GIS module is then used to mark these locations on the map. It is also possible to generate temperature, rainfall and altitude maps. The maps are all vector based and can therefore be printed on any size paper at very high resolution. A lossless zoom function with panning is also available to give the user a powerful GIS tool.

ACPA - Abrupt Change Point Analysis

This analysis deals with the identification of multiple abrupt change points in a sequence of observations in Statistics. The present implementation approach of this analysis is via hypothesis testing and is described in detail in the paper Finding multiple abrupt change points. This program make use of a Pascal DLL due to the computationally intensive routine.

CatStat - Computer Assisted Training in Statistics

Written way back in 1994. CatStat was a Hypertext based textbook system that was developed at the department of Statistics at the North West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa. It was one of the very first hypertext based textbooks. The project started in 1994 and was finished in mid 1995. The main objectives of this application were the following:

    1. Hypertext documents (or textbooks) should be easy to develop and authored in a multi-user network environment so that the subject experts could simultaneously, each work on their part of the textbook.
    2. Full-text facilities must be available (bold, italic, underline, paragraph formatting etc.) and in-line mathematics must be handled with ease via OLE objects (Mathtype or Equation editor).

CatStat also included more than 30 interactive simulations to convey complex statistical concepts to students. It was quite revolutionary at the time. Today, electronic textbooks with hyper-link facilities are common practice.