This paper presents ARANO (West African Rock Art, in its spanish intitials), an Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI for the research and management of the rock art of the Horn of Africa. This SDI is based on the use of free software, which aims to share data in a context of open access to information allowing to different research groups to share a cooperative framework. Beyond the technical aspects of ARANO, that have already been published (Fraguas, 2009), we discuss the usefulness of the cloud, and technologies related to data management in a context of open access, as a means to overcome the scientific and technological gap between North and South, in this case the western and african scientific communities. The methodology employed in the construction of, the ARANO SDI is discussed as an operational example of the potential of the combination of data sharing technologies in Internet and free software as tools for define a socio-political engagement for the information technologies.
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