This past week I attended the official launch of the African Soils Information Service (AfSIS). The workshop was well attended by about fifty attendees from various organizations throughout North America, Europe and of course Africa. The program is developing spatial data and using mapping technology as a key component for its work and because of this there are obvious overlaps with both AGCommons and HarvestChoice. The consortium has four to five years to complete its work which sounds long until you consider what it is trying to achieve. During the kick-off meeting we we're able to spend a day in the field taking soil samples and using spectroscopy to analyze the chemical make up of local soils. There should be some exciting and very useful data coming from this program during the next year.