You might have noticed that we have been offline for a couple off weeks due to our move to a new server. Pretty much everything should be working again now, so please let us know if you come across any problems.
The University of Münster (Germany) offers a senior researcher position at the Institute for Geoinformatics (http://www.ifgi.de) to coordinate the work of the Sensor Web & Simulation Lab (http://swsl.uni-muenster.de).
The working group’s research is focused on the building blocks of the geosensor web and distributed geoprocessing. We are actively contributing to OGC’s standardization process and are conducting several exciting projects in this area.
Check out details about the job offer here:
http://swsl.uni-muenster.de/
The weekly German newspaper Die Zeit (English Wikipedia entry) has a nice column called Deutschlandkarte – map of Germany. Every week, the column presents visually appealing maps on no-so-common topics such as distribution of organic famers, gas pipelines to Germany and statistics on the number of stolen bikes per city (no wonder Münster is number one in this category). It’s all in German, but the maps in the archive are definitely worth a look, even if you do not understand the text.
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There is are a bunch of local conferences, but the three below seem to be the most popular one.
First Open Source GIS UK Conference in Nottingham, UK - 22 June 2009. This conference is organized by the Centre for Geospatial Science of the University of Nottingham and aims at a broad audience ranging from industry to research.
OGRS 2009: International Opensource Geospatial Research Symposium in Nantes, France - 8-10 July 2009. This conference seems to have more a research focus and the accepted papers are published as a Springer book.
FOSS4G 2009: Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial in Sydney, Australia - 20-23 October 2009. Truly the biggest conference this year for open source software in the geospatial domain.
Please choose the one, which suites you best.
OSM 2008: A Year of Editsby ItoWorld is a very impressive and appealing visualization of all the edits made on Open Street Maps in 2008. Some hi-res stills from the CC-licensed video are available on Flickr.
CC-Comic by Geek and Poke. I’m not sure whether this is related to what Tobler had in mind…
Sad news from one of the biggest Open Source map client frameworks: The mapbuilder community decided to stop developing the framework, as announed in this post. This is mostly due to the fact, that OpenLayers got so popular and the overlap between those two projects got so significant, that there does not seem to be a need to have two competitors for MapClient frameworks within OSGeo.
Myself, I did like MapBuilder, as it was so easy to configure and did not require any knowledge about browser scripting and all this. You just configured your XML map context document and you were ready to go.
Anyway the mapbuilder community will release a last stable version of the framework called 1.5. The ppl working on mapbuilder will contribute to the OpenLayers project (as they already did in the past), so maybe some nice features of mapbuilder might appear in OpenLayers in the future.
The Universities of Münster, Bremen and Buffalo have announced a new joint international research training group on semantic integration of geospatial information, starting October 2008:
With this International Research Training Group (IRTG), we address
problems arising when integrating geospatial information from
multiple sources to reason and support decisions about the
human environment. These problems are situated in the overall
research challenge of supporting effective geospatial reasoning
across age and cultures. The common scientific thread of the
entire program is the ambition to create computationally
tractable solutions to problems of semantic integration.
The program offers 6 PhD and 2 post-doc positions. If you want to join us in Münster (or the group in Bremen), have a look at the details (PDF).
Yahoo! is currently running an invitation-only beta test for it’s Fire Eagle location broker. The idea is as simple as useful: Fire Eagle takes your current location as input from different services or applications and passes them on to other services or applications. To locate yourself, the Fire Eagle web site, services like plazes.com, or (possibly GPS-based) applications on mobile devices can be used. The location information is then passed on to all kinds of location based services that provide you with local weather information, shopping guides or simply update your current location on twitter.
It is quite obvious that this raises privacy issues, but I think the people behind Fire Eagle have done quite a good job addressing them: every application or service must be enabled for every user, both for setting and receiving the user’s current location. This permission can be revoked for any service at any time. What is more, Fire Eagle can even be activated only for a given time (1 or 3 months), before the user is required to reactivate it. This is supposed to prevent users from forgetting they are on this services, but still (unknowingly) providing it with location information. And, of course, you can just temporarily disable it.
Having that said, you still have to decide whether you want a to permanently provide Yahoo! with updates on your current location, since they provide the collection point for all your location information, which might raise concerns for some people, although the website says:
If a new piece of ‘Exact Location’ information comes in, then we throw away the old one. No historical record is kept of your location.
After all, you need trust the people behind such a tool. This applies both for Fire Eagle and the applications that you permit to share it your location with. If you do not trust these people, it is probably better not use such tools at all. (Which makes the whole post sound more negative than it was meant to be. It is a neat idea.)
This just came through the FreeGIS Mailinglist:
The 52°North Open Source Initiative hereby issues a call for entries for the 52°North Student Innovation Prize for Geoinformatics.
The aim of this innovation prize is to encourage students to make a contribution to the development and practical realization of innovative concepts in the field of geoinformatics. The competition is directed primarily at students of geoinformatics, computer science, business informatics and media informatics. Applications are requested from small teams of students (2-4 members); applications will also be accepted from individuals (who will also be referred to as teams for the purposes of the competition).
Sounds interesting. The winner team wins some cash and is invited to spend time here in Münster with 52North to further develop their ideas in a professional environment. Hope they get some high quality submissions.
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