UNIGIS thesis winning award at ETH Zurich

Big time congratulations to Simon Häsler: he not only recently completed his UNIGIS MSc at the University of Salzburg, but also managed to collect the prestigious distinction of 'Student of the Year' at ETH Zürich, where his thesis was supervised by Prof Martin Raubal.

From the News at ETH Zürich:
"In its role as Esri Development Center (EDC) the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation once per year awards the EDC price for the best student thesis for which Esri technologies were used. This year’s price is awarded to Simon Haesler for his thesis about „Erstellung und Evaluation einer service-orientierten Systemarchitektur zur ortsbezogenen blickbasierten Interaktion mit 3D-Geoobjekten“ (Supervisor: Prof. M. Raubal, Advisors: Dr. P. Kiefer, I. Giannopoulos). 
Congratulations!"

> Photo from award ceremony
> Link to full thesis

Learning QGIS

You always wanted to extend your GIS software skills towards FOSS products like QGIS? There is no excuse not to start on your own, with excellent learning materials freely available online:

• One recent  highlight are 'MOOC'-style online courses: http://foss4geo.org/
• Start with https://canvas.instructure.com/enroll/LA4DR9
• There is an extensive training manual: http://manual.linfiniti.com/en/index.html
• With video tutorial support: http://qgis-tutorials.mangomap.com/post/79334660226/qgis-video-tutorials-module-1-the-interface
• And of course documentation: http://www.qgis.org/en/docs/index.html 
• Plus the invaluable book by Anita Graser: http://www.packtpub.com/learning-qgis-2-0-to-create-maps-and-perform-geoprocessing-tasks/book
• For sure you will find summer schools, conferences, trainings etc as well!

So ... just 'do it', enjoy the lifelong learning experience, and lots of success with your GIS projects!

UNIGIS professionals @ work

This weekend a group of 16 professionals from various disciplines got together in Salzburg to participate in an introductory workshop of the UNIGIS professional certificate distance learning program in Geoinformatics.

...Wait a minute, did you say WORKshop? Look at the pictures!

Hm, yes, there was work done, but the pictures illustrate the probably most important part of this event: Getting to know each other to go together into a year of intensive learning, requiring discussion and mutual support!