The First Latin America Congress of Free and Open Source GIS (Latin OSGIS) will be held on October, 22-23 2012 in Guayaquil, Ecuador . The event is organised by Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (Ecuador) and Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and supported by the International Cartographic Association (ICA), International Association for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

The First Call for Papers is now available at http://www.fiec.espol.edu.ec/LatinOSGIS/index.php/en/en-latinosgis-conference/en-conference-call-papers

Important dates:

Deadline for abstract submission:      August 17, 2012
Notification of acceptance:            September 17, 2012

Details at http://www.fiec.espol.edu.ec/LatinOSGIS/index.php/en/

If you have research contacts in Latin America, we would appreciate your help in forwarding this info. For more details please contact Dr Indira Nolivos Alvarez (Local Coordinator, Latin OSGIS ,Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral). Thanks in advance.

We are pleased to announce 5 “Open Nottingham” bursaries for excellent students to participate in OSGIS 2012. This is part of our strong commitment to actively support, widen and promote Open Nottingham initiative. In implementing the Open Nottingham programme, the University of Nottingham has strategically embraced an agenda of open access to teaching.  More details of Open Nottingham at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/open/opennottingham.aspx 

The “Open Nottingham” bursaries will cover the cost of one day registration fees to participate in OSGIS 2012 and are open for students from all UK universities (both postgraduate and undergraduate) . Applicants should email their one page CV and brief statement of their open source research to Suchith.Anand@nottingham.ac.uk    with subject header “Open Nottingham bursary application”. The deadline for application  is 6th  August 2012. The winners will be notified on 10th  August 2012.

This year’s OSGIS Keynote presentations are:

#  “2011: the first Open census and beyond? ” Prof. David Martin (University of Southampton)
#  “What a long strange trip it’s been”  – Steven Feldman (KnowWhere Consulting and FOSS4G 2013 Chair)
#  “Ordnance Survey – embracing the open source opportunity” – Ian James ( Chief Architect, Information Systems, Ordnance Survey & Technical Architect, UK Location Programme)

OSGIS 2012 Workshops include

# How to setup and use an SDI in 3 hours-  Geocat (Netherlands) 
# Getting started with GeoServer and INSPIRE services –  GeoSolutions (Italy) 
# Educational use of OSGeo Live – Ari Jolma, Aalto Uni (Finland)
# Advanced GeoNetwork – Geocat (Netherlands)
# OSM-GB services and data – NGI (UK)
More details at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/osgis/home.aspx 

This month’s Open Nottingham seminar was presented by Dr Luciene Delazari (Federal University of Parana, Brazil)   on  “Research in Cartography  – overview and perspectives”. In May 2012, Luciene Delazari and her colleagues  established the first Open Source Geospatial Laboratory in the South America at the Federal University of Parana.  Details at http://www.osgeo.org/node/1281  

I was especially pleased to hear updates about the Open Source Geospatial Lab developments that she and her group has established in the last 3 months and the partnerships they have build with various organisations in Brazil . So I am very confident that over the next 2-3 year time frame the Open Source Geospatial Lab at UFPR will rapidly expand and we will build more research collaborations.  

Speaker Biography:

Dr Luciene Delazari is assistant professor in Cartography and GIS at the Federal University of Parana, Brazil. Over the years Luciene Delazari taught many courses in Cartography and GIS, both at undergraduate and graduate level. She gave guest lectures, tutorials and courses at universities and conferences in many cities around Brazil. She is leading Cartography and GIS research at Geodetic Science Program and published over 20 journal papers in this field. Her research interests and publications are in cartographic visualization, interface design for cartographic products and automated cartographic design.

The Nottingham Geospatial Institute (University of Nottingham), Open Source Geospatial Foundation (UK chapter) , ICA Commission on Open Source Geospatial Technologies and the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories for Europe (AGILE)  are organising the Fourth Open  Source GIS Conference in the UK on 4th – 5th Sep 2012 at the University of Nottingham. Details at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/osgis/  
 
We are now pleased to announce the keynote speakers and workshops for OSGIS 2012.
 
OSGIS 2012 Keynote Speakers:
 
•         Prof. David Martin (University of Southampton)
•         Steven Feldman (KnowWhere Consulting and FOSS4G 2013 Chair)
•         Ian James (Chief Architect, Information Systems, Ordnance Survey & Technical Architect, UK Location Programme) 
 
OSGIS 2012 Workshops:
 
Sep 4th, 2012
 
•         AM- “GeoNetwork for dummies, or how to setup and use an SDI in 3 hours”-  Geocat (Netherlands) 
 
•         PM- Getting started with GeoServer and INSPIRE services”,  GeoSolutions (Italy) 
 
•         All day  “Educational use of OSGeo Live”, Ari Jolma, Aalto Uni (Finland)
 
Sep 5th, 2012
 
•         PM – “Advanced GeoNetwork” – Geocat (Netherlands)
 
•         PM-  “OSM-GB services and data”- NGI  
 
 
The key aims of OSGIS are:
 
o hear presentations from government, academic, industry and policy makers on open source, open standards and open data geospatial technologies
o To understand current developments in open source GIS
o to act as a focus for open source, open standards, open data GIS research
o To provide platform to network and develop ideas for future collaborative work in open source GIS
 
Registrations are now open at   http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/osgis/     
Places for workshops are limited. The provisional agenda for the main conference is also available at the website.
 
We are look forward to welcoming you to the University of Nottingham for an interesting conference and building future research collaborations in this exciting and rapidly developing research theme.

The workshop is a first workshop in the topic and will focus on educational use of the OSGeo Live, which is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB thumb drive or a Virtual Machine based on Xubuntu containing a wide variety of free and open source geospatial software. The OSGeo Live system is ready-to-use and it can be extended with the Debian-based Ubuntu package system. Details at http://live.osgeo.org/en/index.html   

The workshop aims to review the current state of how OSGeo and other free geospatial software and datasets are used in Universities, mainly in educational contexts, and discuss how the software could be better made advantage of especially by using the OSGeo Live. A further goal of the workshop is to initiate a network of people skilled in the technology behind the OSGeo Live system and coordinate resources of OSGeo education and curriculum community for this purpose.

 This full day workshop will be held in conjunction with the 4th Open Source GIS Conference in Nottingham, UK, on September 4, 2012. Details at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/osgis/home.aspx  

 Workshop topics:

• OSGeo and other free geospatial software in Universities
• Educational materials that use free geospatial software
• Packaging software and other digital materials for Ubuntu
• Experiences in delivering education using free geospatial software
• Experiences in packaging educational materials for geospatial
• Experiences in using OSGeo Live in Universities
• Experiences in using OSGeo Edu and other initiatives (OLPC, RPi etc) in Schools 

The workshop consists of invited talks and presentations selected from this call as well as of panel discussions, breakout sessions and other methods of collaboration.

Please submit a short abstract of your presentation (max 300 words) before July 31, 2012. The presentations will be selected by the organizing committee. Presentations will in general be 30 minutes. You will receive notification of acceptance by August 10, 2012. All presentations will be published on the web and included in the OSGIS 2012 proceedings USB.

Please send the abstract of your presentation to ari.jolma@aalto.fi   before July 31, 2012.

Organizers:

Ari Jolma (Aalto University, Finland)

Suchith Anand  (University of Nottingham, UK)

 Jeremy Morley  (University of Nottingham, UK)

 Charles M. Schweik (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)