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!

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