Stamen design Field Papers

  • Posted on: 30 May 2012
  • By: köbben

Stamen design (webmapping & design company, known for providing interactive webapps for the VPRO series "Nederland van Boven") is announcing "Field Papers" a web mapping services for paper maps!

At first glance, it looks like a nifty system that could be quite useful for fieldwork...

From their web page http://content.stamen.com/announcing_field_papers: "We've just rolled out a new way for you to make atlases of the world, called Field Papers. Field Papers allows you to print a multipage paper atlas of anywhere in the world and take it outside, offline, into the field. You can scribble on it, add features, or make notes about the area, all without a GPS or complicated GIS software.
Once you've annotated your atlas, you can upload photographs of each page back into the system to transcribe your notes into digital form. Each atlas gets its own page on Field Papers, and a simple history of edits and activity which you can share with friends or colleagues, and download for later analysis. Take a look at some of the atlases that have already been created on the Watch page, or browse by place, like France or Liberia."

OSGEO/ICA Open Source Geospatial Lab initiative in South America

  • Posted on: 23 May 2012
  • By: köbben

On behalf of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the International Cartographic Association (ICA), i am pleased to announce about the Open Source Geospatial Lab initiative in South America. After the successful establishment of Open Geospatial Labs in Europe, Asia and Africa , we are happy to have the first such initiative in South America being established at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) in Brazil. Federal University of Paraná is regarded as the oldest Brazilian university. Details at http://www.ufpr.br/portalufpr/

In 2011, the International Cartographic Association signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation with the aim to developing global collaboration opportunities for academia, industry and government organisations in the field of open source GIS software and data. The MoU aims to provide expertise and support for the establishment of Open Source Geospatial Laboratories and Research Centres across the world to support the development of open source geospatial software technologies, training and expertise.

The Open Geospatial Lab at Federal University of Paraná will be led by Prof. Silviana Comboin . Silviana has strong research background in Geospatial Science, SDI and GI standards. Previously she was working at the Brazilian National Mapping Agency before moving to Federal University of Paraná as a professor at the Geomatics Department. She also coordinate the Standards Workgroup of the Brazilian NSDI (INDE). She also have a strong team and action plan in place for building this initiative for Brazil and South America. The initial team of Open Geospatial Lab at UFPR will comprise of Prof. Dr. Luciene S. Delazari ,Prof. Dr. Maria Cecilia B. Brandalize , Prof. Dr. Claudia Robbi Sluter , André Luiz Alencar de Mendonça and Gisele Canova (IBGE - Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).

We are working to expand this ICA-OSGeo initiative http://www.osgeo.org/node/1230 globally in our aim to bring the benefits of geospatial technology to all. If you are interested in establishing Open Source Geospatial Lab at your university and build research and teaching collaborations please contact me and I will be pleased to discuss details.

Hackathon in Tanzania rocks

  • Posted on: 13 May 2012
  • By: lemmens

The Hackathon was a success! 22 hackers started to work on 6 challenges, such as plugging Swahili translation services, gazetteer services and human sensor webs into interoperable web applications. Today the Hack ended with presentations by the participants in the Innovation Space at COSTECH. The best teams won IT books and headsets. See the full reports at the links below:

https://sites.google.com/site/sematanzania/activities-and-events/whatthehackitsthefirstsemahackathon

https://sites.google.com/site/sematanzania/activities-and-events/gloryathacksend

Rob.

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