Thanks to efforts of many colleagues at the University of Nottingham and the OSGeo UK Local Chapter we had another successful OSGIS conference this year. In addition to all our presenters, workshop organisers, sponsors and delegates, I would like to specifically thank Donna Astill, Lesley Gray, Jeremy Morley, Mike Jackson, Amir Pourabdollah, Corinne Cassidy,  Steve Moore and IT support team for Workshops, Sally Hanson  and Webcasting team, Catering staff,  Halls of Residence staff at UoN who all put lot of efforts to help make OSGIS 2012 a great success.

The recorded webcasts of the conference will be  made available for  the benefit of the wider community soon at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/osgis/home.aspx

Winners of OSGIS Open Nottingham Best  Presentation awards 2012

“Automatically repairing polygons and planar partitions” – Ken Arroyo Ohori , Hugo Ledoux, Martijn Meijers (TU Delft, Netherlands)

“Building a OS MasterMap tile service on an Open Source geostack” – Matt Walker (Astun Technology, UK)

“Analysing GeoServer compatibility with INSPIRE requirements” – Andrea Aime, Simone Giannecchini (GeoSolutions, Italy)

Well done to all winners.

OSGeo Live 6.0 Officially launched at OSGIS 2012

We also officially launched  Version 6.0 of the OSGeo-Live GIS software collection at OSGIS 2012. Details at  http://www.osgeo.org/node/1307

Over 120 people have directly helped with OSGeo-Live packaging, documenting and translating, and thousands have been involved in building the packaged software. We are very thankful for the  efforts of thousands of volunteers who worked for the latest release of OSGeo Live 6.0

There is whole range of excellent software (DesktopGIS,  Databases, Webservices etc) available free for the benefit of everyone.

Full list of software available at http://live.osgeo.org/en/overview/overview.html

University of Southampton to establish Open Source Geospatial Lab

Prof. David Martin who was the keynote speaker at OSGIS 2012 announced University of Southampton’s aim for the establishment of Open Source Geospatial Lab  to build up research in this strategic area at the University of Southampton.  Onbehalf of OSGeo and ICA, we strongly welcome this initiative. We look forward to work with colleagues in Southampton for building research collaborations for the future.

I am also in discussions with other key research universities for the establishment of Open Geospatial Labs and will announce more details in due course. Our aim is to  establish 20 new research labs in the next 3 years. These new research labs are strategic to  help us accelerate research developments in this area for the future. If your university wishes to establish Open Source Geospatial Lab, please contact me and i will be pleased to discuss details.

We look forward for your continued support for building up Open Source, Open Standards, Open Data research globally and seeing you at FOSS4G 2013 at Nottingham for building further research collaborations.