Oracle Excellence in Education Award for UNIGIS

During the Oracle Spatial Summit on May 22 2014 in Washington, DC, UNIGIS Salzburg was distinguished as recipient of the Oracle Spatial and Graph Excellence Award in the 'Education and Research' category. Xavier Lopez, Senior Director for Oracle Server Technologies presented the award to Prof. Josef Strobl from the Department of Geoinformatics - Z_GIS, University of Salzburg.

In his remarks, Xavier Lopez recognized the worldwide outreach facilitated by UNIGIS distance learning programmes, putting graduate geospatial education within reach of everyone interested. Qualified alumni are the critically important resource to develop geospatial applications and to leverage current and future technologies. The collaboration between Oracle and UNIGIS Salzburg had already reached a key milestone back in 2002 with the designation of Z_GIS as an Oracle Spatial Center of Excellence. Since then, in addition to applied projects, extensive education materials were developed, turning hundreds of students into experts for geospatial databases.

Of course, looking ahead is much more interesting than contemplating history: geospatial education is facing new opportunities and challenges, like cloud-based software, scaling of education, microlearning and mobile learning. Several of these topics will be at the core of future initiatives fostering capacity building and ultimately supporting spatial thinkers and geospatial designers&developers.

Registration countdown for the 5th Open Source Opportunities in GIS Summer School

The 5th Open Source Opportunities in GIS Summer School focused on Open Web Services and Web Map Applications will take place from 7th to 11th of July 2014 in Girona. It's organized by SIGTE of the University of Girona with the contribution of Prodevelop (partner de OpenGeo) and the Nottingham Geoespatial Institute of the University of Nottingham.

The Open Source Opportunities in GIS Summer School is an initiative aimed to meet the GIS professional demands related to free and open solutions, and we are working on this vision from the start. The Summer School 2014 will be focused on the development and creation of Open Web Services and Web Applications, especially on the publication of data on the web. With this goal, the programme will cover topics related to the acquisition and importation of OpenStreetMap data into a spatial database, creation of geospatial web services and development of internet viewers for publishing geospatial data.

If you are interested in application development and creation of web map services using the most widely used free and open source market products, then this is your opportunity.


Keep in mind!

Registration: until 27th of June 2014

More information

Winners: UNIGIS Master Thesis Award 2014

We congratulate all finalists - Marco Saner, Keith Peterson and Bernd Härtwig - to being selected as the top MSc theses in 2013!

In a public vote following brief presentations in an online webinar format  Keith Peterson was identified as the overall winner. In his master thesis he presents an approach for Monitoring Mangrove Reforestation with TerraSAR-X in Senegal. 

Learn more about this exciting research on our UNIGIS Alumni Website!

Congratulations to Keith from the entire UNIGIS team. We are looking forward to welcoming Keith at the AGIT / GI_Forum Symposium (July 2-4 2014) in Salzburg. 

u_Lecture: Euro Beinat on Collective Sensing

On May 2nd, Prof Euro Beinat will be speaking on 'Data Science and Predictive Analytics', exploring the emerging world of collective sensing, how new data streams such as social media or digital transactions provide new sources to understand our collective behavior and make complex systems such as cities more transparent.

Prof Beinat is professor at Z_GIS, and leads research on Data Analytics and Collective Sensing within the PhD School for GIScience at the University of Salzburg. He coined the term "Collective Sensing" for describing the growing science and practice of measuring and predicting the dynamics of large complex systems, such as cities, based on aggregating anonymous digital breadcrumbs left by all of us during daily personal or business activities (for links to current research, see www.collectivesensing.org).

To register for this lecture, go to https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/179280022

'u_Lectures' are a successful webinar format, presenting invited speakers from academia, the GI industry, public administration, NGOs and other actors in the field of Geoinformatics and GIScience. Available primarily to UNIGIS alumni and active UNIGIS students, this online lecture series serves as a professional and academic ‚updating‘ opportunity within a generic ‚lifelong learning‘ framework.

A step towards better maps

Good maps require more than just displaying your data, add a legend, a scale bar and the “obligatory” north arrow. If you want to “hook” your audience and tell your “location based story” in an intuitive way, there is a lot to consider: The nature of the phenomenon you are portraying, the application context, the target audience or the chosen technology are only a few of the multitude of variables to take care of. 
The latest release of the UNIGIS Module on Cartography and Visualization provides essential information on how to transform your data into appealing, yet effective maps “that work”. 15 completely reworked and richly illustrated lessons take you all along the journey of contemporary, applied visualization of geographic data -  from basics like generalization, classification, visual variables and symbol development to the most recent web mapping technologies, maps as web-interfaces, 3D-visualizations  and dynamic representations of space-time data.

 More than 30 exercises plus four individualized assignments ensure understanding of the concepts and its applicability in everyday mapping contexts. “We put a lot of effort into this huge long-term project, but our intensive work finally paid off” says Martin Loidl, co-author of the module. “Although our students will profit foremost, we generated several new ideas by ‘digging deep’ within the authoring process. A bunch of scientific publications in this area were nice by-products to the planned outcome.” he added. The (German language) UNIGIS professional intake from Oktober 2013 will be the first group to start with the new release. A translation to English is scheduled to be available by May as well.