We are pleased to announce that the 50th ICA-OSGeo Lab has been established at the GIS and Remote Sensing Unit (Piattaforma GIS & Remote Sensing, PGIS), Research and Innovation Centre (CRI), Fondazione Edmund Mach (FEM), Italy. CRI is a multifaceted research organization established in 2008 under the umbrella of FEM, a private research foundation funded by the government of Autonomous Province of Trento. CRI focuses on studies and innovations in the fields of agriculture, nutrition, and environment, with the aim to generate new sharing knowledge and to contribute to economic growth, social development and the overall improvement of quality of life.

The mission of the PGIS unit is to develop and provide multi-scale approaches for the description of 2-, 3- and 4-dimensional biological systems and processes. Core activities of the unit include acquisition, processing and validation of geo-physical, ecological and spatial datasets collected within various research projects and monitoring activities, along with advanced scientific analysis and data management. These studies involve multi-decadal change analysis of various ecological and physical parameters from continental to landscape level using satellite imagery and other climatic layers. The lab focuses on the geostatistical analysis of such information layers, the creation and processing of indicators, and the production of ecological, landscape genetics, eco-epidemiological and physiological models. The team pursues actively the development of innovative methods and their implementation in a GIS framework including the time series analysis of proximal and remote sensing data.

The GIS and Remote Sensing Unit (PGIS) members strongly support the peer reviewed approach of Free and Open Source software development which is perfectly in line with academic research. PGIS contributes extensively to the open source software development in geospatial (main contributors to GRASS GIS), often collaborating with various other developers and researchers around the globe. In the new ICA-OSGeo lab at FEM international PhD students, university students and trainees are present.

PGIS is focused on knowledge dissemination of open source tools through a series of courses designed for specific user requirement (schools, universities, research institutes), blogs, workshops and conferences. Their recent publication in Trends in Ecology and Evolution underlines the need on using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for completely open science. Dr. Markus Neteler, who is leading the group since its formation, has two decades of experience in developing and promoting open source GIS software. Being founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo.org, USA), he served on its board of directors from 2006-2011. Luca Delucchi, focal point and responsible person for the new ICA-OSGeo Lab is member of the board of directors of the Associazione Italiana per l’Informazione Geografica Libera (GFOSS.it, the Italian Local Chapter of OSGeo). He contributes to several Free and Open Source software and open data projects as developer and trainer.

Details about the GIS and Remote Sensing Unit at https://gis.cri.fmach.it/

Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2006 whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open source geospatial technologies and data.

International Cartographic Association (ICA) is the world authoritative body for cartography and GIScience. See also the new ICA-OSGeo Labs website.

In my presentation I briefly review 3 decades of Open Source GIS development, from the 1980th to the present.

See my slides:

Scaling up globally: 30 years of FOSS4G development. Keynote at FOSS4G-CEE 2013, Romania by Markus Neteler

 

Presentation file: Download presentation file (ODP) to get all the clickable links working!

IPA (IT promotion agency Japan), a government agency, has announced that the OSGeo Japan Chapter will be awarded “Japanese Open Source Software Encouragement Award” on 28th October 2010.

IPA (IT promotion agency Japan) has earlier funded the internationalization of GRASS GIS and Mapserver and it is just that they have been fast it recognizing the good work done by OSGeo and the Japan Local Chapter.

The Japan chapter was established in late 2006 and the local community has been growing steadily and dedicating effort to promoting FOSS4G.

Press release by IPA (in Japanese)
https://www.ipa.go.jp/about/press/20101015_2.html

About the award
IPA grants “Japanese OSS Contributor Award” to a developer who has established and has been managing the development project which has the nfluence, to a superior developer who takes an active role in the global projects and to a contributor to spread the Open Source Software. Also IPA grants “Japanese Open Source Software Encouragement Award” to the individual or the group which has a remarkable activity to develop and/or spread OSS.

About IPA
https://www.ipa.go.jp/english/about/index.html

The Toronto Code Sprint 2009 – pure productivity:

… with great benefits for Mapserver, PostGIS, GDAL, GeoTools, …

Paul nicely summarizes the Toronto Code Sprint Lessons as well as CampToCamp.

OSGeo is pleased to announce that the MapServer project has graduated from the incubation process and is now a full fledged OSGeo project with Steve Lime appointed as project representative (Vice President, MapServer).

MapServer is a web map server for building spatially enabled web applications. MapServer excels at rendering spatial data (maps, images, and vector data) for the Web, supporting a wide variety of geospatial input formats, and Web output formats. MapServer supports a pure CGI mode, as well as developing server applications in languages such as Python, Perl, Java and C#.

https://mapserver.osgeo.org/

Graduating incubation includes requirements for open community operation, a responsible project governance model, code provenance and license verification and general good project operation. Graduating incubation is the OSGeo seal of approval for a project and gives potential users of the project added confidence in the viability and safety of the project (see https://www.osgeo.org/incubator).