SavGIS©: a GIS rising from the research for the development, working under MS Windows©

SavGIS© is a GIS, which includes some remote sensing functionalities, developed since 1984 by the lRD (Development Research French Institute) to answer the specific needs of the IRD scientific teams and their counterparts (geographers, demographers, geologists, epidemiologists, entomologists, archaeologists….). It was first implemented in Latin America: in Quito (Ecuador), in the state of Veracruz (Mexico), in the region of Tijuana-San Diego (at the border between USA and Mexico), in the province of Limari (Chile), at Brasilia, and also in Africa, in Senegal, in some cities such as Bamako, Abidjan, Addis-Abeba, Tunis and in some refugees camps in Kenya. It is also used in New-Caledonia (research programme on the lagoon monitoring) and in Thailand within the framework or a scientific programme on the conditions and territories of emergence of vector-borne infectious diseases. SavGIS© is compatible with other commercial products (ArcGIS, MS Access, AutoCad). A small team is currently being working on the development, upgrades and diffusion of the software. SavGIS© works under MS Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP and Vista.

SavGIS©: a GIS freeware, available online in three languages (French, English, Spanish)

The development of SavGIS© aims at providing scientists communities, academics and land managers with an alternative GIS freeware. The development of SavGIS© falls under the current tendency of making available more and more freeware solutions (such as OpenOffice, Grass, R). Our team endeavours to also provide on this website sample SavGIS© databases, tutorials, exercises and a getting started handbook.

SavGIS© is a GIS available in three languages (French, English, Spanish). It thus makes it possible to answer at the requests of our partners of South America, French and English-speaking Africa.

SavGIS©: a GIS in four modules

The Savamer module
The SAVAMER module allows to geo-reference images (topographic maps, aerial photographs, satellite images, DEM) and to also rectify vector files (shapefile). The Savamer module makes it possible to mosaic images and to integrate them into a SavGIS© geographic database.

The Savedit module

The SAVEDIT module allows to digitise on screen with vector control quality and topology control. It also makes it possible to import GPS points and shapefile. It includes a semi-automated image vectorisation function too.

The Savateca module
The SAVATECA module is meant for managing the SavGIS© geodatabase. It allows to create SavGIS© geodatabases, to add or remove relations (layers) and attributes (fields). It makes it possible to create users, to manage the external views (selection of relations to which the users have an access). It is also through this module that are integrated into the SavGIS© database, the vector data and their related alphanumerical tables.

The Savane module
SAVANE is the main module of SavGIS© system. It integrates a wide set of functionalities to analyse and to map out data encompassed in a SavGIS© geo-database. The interface gathers in an ergonomic environment a large variety of tools for querying and processing data (join, aggregation, selection, multicriterion research, shortest path and neighbourhood relationships, statistics, geo-statistics…). It also provides cartography tools and modelling functions. Savane is a general-purpose freeware which makes it possible to quickly apprehend all the facets of a GIS use. It also includes remote sensing functions (classification, colour composite generation, spatial filtering, vegetation indices…).  Savane is interoperable with other commercial software, in particular with MS Access and ArcGIS (export to shapefile format).