You all are invited to join a seminar ( join the live webcast) on “Geospatial Information for United Nations” to be delivered by Kyoung-Soo Eom, Chief Geospatial Information Section, Department of Field Support, United Nations at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Thanks to Prof. Maria Brovelli and colleagues at Politecnico di Milano for organising this.
Date & Time : 14th March 2016 at 15.30 (Italy time) . Please check your local times.
The event will be also available in streaming at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqKblSZUBd0
The UN Geospatial Information Section supports cartographic and geospatial information needs of the Security Council and the UN Secretariat including UN field missions, and oversees global GIS programmes at UN Headquarters and in the UN field missions. It provides fundamental geospatial products and applications, which can be for brevity summarized as Geographic Information System (GIS) services, to: Security Council members, decision makers, political analysts, information managers, planning & operation teams, humanitarian affairs, economic & social affairs, safety & security and logisticians with a wide array of geospatial services. It also supports Member States in boundary making activities upon request. The UN Geospatial Information Section, together with the Statistics Division, is providing support to the UN Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM), as co-Secretariat.
Mr. Kyoung-Soo Eom joined the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in January 1999, and he identified the missed opportunities in using geospatial information and GIS tools in order to meet the operational needs to support effective decision-making of UN peacekeeping operations.
In March 2005, Mr. Eom was appointed Chief of UN Geospatial Information Section (formerly UN Cartographic Section), to which he brought the newly established and successful GIS programme. In accordance with the Peace Agreement between Eritrea and Ethiopia, the UN Secretary-General designated Mr. Eom to serve as the Secretary of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission (EEBC), and he successfully provided all administrative and technical service support to the EEBC activities in 2006-2008.
In his “Geospatial Information for United Nations” presentation at Politecnico di Milano Mr. Eom will describe in details as follows:
1. What are the geospatial information and services requirements for United Nations operations.
2. How geospatial information and services are supported for United Nations operations.
3. Collaboration and partnership as well as vision, “Geo-enabled UN operations”
This also builds upon the synergies of the United Nations Technical workshop in Brindisi (Italy) [1] last week to support the United Nations Open Geospatial (UNOGeo) initiative. Thanks to Massimiliano Cannata and Maria Brovelli for thier efforts on this. We will be strongly supporting and establishing collaboration with the United Nations for this initiative.Both Maria and Maxi are members of the technical committee of this new UNOGeo initiative and we congratulate them.
The possible contributions from OSGeo for this initiative are:
– expertise on open source software
– access to the incubation process
– bridge / connection with the private sector
– connection with OSGeo projects
– connection with Geo4All labs
– support in education, research and training
The keen interest in, and commitment to, OSGeo and FOSS4G by United Nations agencies resulted in the organization of a full day U.N. Special Session entitled “Open Source GIS in United Nations and Developing Countries” on September 16 at FOSS4G 2016 [2] .Thanks to Sanghee Shin for his efforts to make this possible and laying the foundations of our long term commitement to the United Nations community. I am confident we will build upon on these excellent developments and will have dedicated session for the United Nations in all future FOSS4G global events including FOSS4G 2016 Bonn http://2016.foss4g.org/home.html this year to keep expanding our close collaborations with the United Nations.
So please join the webcast at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqKblSZUBd0
Best wishes,
Suchith Anand
http://www.geoforall.org/
[1] http://www.unlb.org/
[2] http://2015.foss4g.org/united-nations-special-session/