Monthly Archives: April 2015

Mapping response contributions for Nepal

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Our thoughts and prayers to all those affected by the terrible earthquake in Nepal. Hope our colleagues and families at Kathmandu University are fine.
Shashish and colleagues in Nepal – if you are reading this, please update and if you need to coordinate relief activities with the wider geocommunity  etc , please let us know
On behalf of Geo for All  http://www.geoforall.org/  ,i request you all to inform your colleagues and students to contribute in the crisis mapping action launched by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. This will also help teach the students also the real essence of education and humanity and “sharing knowledge and expertise” to help each other in times of need.We thank our colleagues (esp. Maria Brovelli, Marco Minghini and Giovanna Venuti) and students at GEO Lab in Como (which is one of the GeoForAll Labs) for also organising a mapping  initiative to support the relief efforts.

Details at http://www.polo-como.polimi.it/news/dettaglio-della-news/article/165/helping-nepal-with-a-mapping-action-at-como-campus-967/

This is a request for all  those who would like to contribute to the mapping response, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has many  tasks set up at
http://tasks.hotosm.org
The scale of the efforts needed is huge, so more volunteers esp. with FOSS experience in automatic image classification and feature extraction and wish to contribute to the mapping response for the Nepal earthquake are needed .
There are many tasks that need to be accomplished at http://tasks.hotosm.org/http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2015_Nepal_earthquake

If you already have OSM experience , it is better. If not you go through tutorial at http://mapgive.state.gov/learn-to-map/
Then, click on one of the HOT priority areas on their site and follow the on-screen instructions.
Anyone with FOSS experience in automatic image classification and feature extraction and wish to contribute to the mapping response for the Nepal earthquake, please contact Cristiano Giovando (Technical Project Manager ,Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team http://hot.openstreetmap.org ) Email- cristiano.giovando@hotosm.org  .

Thanks again for all of you for your support and help with this.

Suchith Anand

Open Letter for the need for Open Standards in LiDAR

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To all colleagues in Academia, Government and Industry who have interest in maintaining Open Standards:

On behalf of “Geo for All” community, http://www.geoforall.org , I would like to bring to your kind attention a significant development that can lead to undermining our principle for Open Geospatial Standards. I request you review the wikipage http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/LIDAR_Format_Letter   that is meant to represent our concern and allow for ongoing input and expression by our geospatial community.

We specifically thank Martin Isenburg (author of LASzip and LAStools, http://laszip.org and http://lastools.org) for  bringing this matter to our attention  and an email thread of our initial discussion of this subject that highlight the wider implication of this issuehttp://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/ica-osgeo-labs/2015-March/001225.html

We request all who wish to support this effort to protect Open Standards for Geospatial data to kindly add your name , email, affiliation details to the wikipage directly or email  Patrick Hogan (Email – patrick.hogan@nasa.gov ) with the subject heading “Support for Open Geo Standards” and the following fields (Name, Email, Affiliation ) and we will gladly add this to the wiki.

There is current interest by the OGC in pursuing point cloud encoding standards, including a member-initiated mechanism to extend LAS data with OGC-standard XML content. The OGC invites interested members who wish to  work on this effort to please contact Scott Simmons (Executive Director, Standards Program  E-mail : ssimmons@opengeospatial.org  ) to register their interest and discuss details.  OGC will also be holding an ad hoc session at our next Technical Committee meeting in Boulder, CO, USA in June 1st (more details will be send soon) to bring together all interested from all sectors (government, industry, academia) for this and plan next steps. We welcome feedback and input from Esri and invite them to join this effort to  support open LIDAR formats.

I thank you all again for your attention and support for this important matter.

Best wishes,

Suchith Anand
Founder, GeoForAll
http://www.geoforall.org

Invitation to NASA Europa Challenge 2015 – Solutions For a Sustainable World

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On behalf of “Geo for All”  http://www.geoforall.org    , i would like to welcome strong global participation for the third edition of the NASA Worldwind Europa challenge. The aim of this challenge is to inspire ideas for building great applications that serves the INSPIRE Directive and uses NASA’s open source virtual globe technology World Wind  http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/. Details of the challenge at http://eurochallenge.como.polimi.it/

This NASA challenge attracts the best minds  to develop their ideas covering  a broad range of domains from transportation to air quality to linked data.  The previous competition winners work is available at
http://eurochallenge.como.polimi.it/projects2013
http://eurochallenge.como.polimi.it/projects2014

We thank Professor Maria Brovelli (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) and Patrick Hogan (NASA) for their efforts for this initiative which adds great momentum to our efforts to promote openness in education and research worldwide.

We encourage you to inform this initiative to your students and have project teams for this. Already some excellent project ideas and teams have been formed for this year’s challenge and the deadline for project submissions is 1 July 2015. We will be awarding the winners at FOSS4G 2015- Europe “Open Innovation for Europe” conference at Como, Italy in July . Details at http://europe.foss4g.org/2015/

Also this year at FOSS4G-Europe , we will be also be announcing the winners of the “GeoForAll – Global Educator of the Year Award 2015” from the excellent list of nominations that we received at http://www.osgeo.org/node/1506

This is a great opportunity for us to thank all colleagues for their excellent contributions to Openness in Education principles in the Geo domain and to thank all educators worldwide who have made contributions to open education efforts and being good global citizens by helping spread the benefits of education to all.

By combining the potential of  Free and Open Source software, Open Standards, Open Data, Open Education Resources,  you all have made “Geo for All”   the PLATFORM for offering education opportunities to nurture and develop Open Minds in students globally for a better planet and better future for all…

Best wishes,

Suchith Anand
Founder, Geo for All
http://www.geoforall.org