OpenSource GeoSpatial seminar
The Geography department of Bucharest University hosted a geospatial.org seminar in Bucharest, on 7-8 October 2011 which we (Miruna and Alex) attended. Most of the first day was for presentations, followed by workshops, that continued on the 2nd day. Some of the presentation highlights:
- eHarta is a dataset of digitised historical maps of Romania. It won the “better data” award at the Open Data Challenge. These maps, and many others, are freely available on their GeoServer website.
- Highlights from a century-old account of mapping the Romanian coastline.
- An application for maritime and river navigation, showing terrain, visual features, boat traffic and water depth cues.
- An overview of the OpenStreetMap database, how to contribute, and existing applications.
- Reconstructing a 3D space based on a collection of 2D images.
We attended the workshops about the OpenGeo Suite and GDAL/ORG. This would have been handy knowledge in building the AoA map search interface, where we discovered mapping the hard way, blisfully ignorant of some useful open-source tools. Also attended a workshop about statistics on geographic data using the R language. I suspect similar results can be achieved using SciPy, but it was a refreshing look at another way of doing things.