[OSGeo-Announce] Geometa Lab at HSR (Switzerland) becomes member of the ICA-OSGeo Network and "Geo for All" initiative

[Anne Ghisla]

We are pleased to announce that the Geometa Lab at HSR [1]
(Switzerland) became a new member of the ICA-OSGeo Network. The lab is
part of the Institute for Software at the University of Applied
Sciences in Rapperswil (referred to as "HSR"). It was founded in 2000
by the current director of the lab, Professor Stefan Keller.

The Geometa Lab combines modern software techniques - like software
engineering and agile methods - with geospatial applications and
develops projects with QGIS, GDAL/OGR and PostGIS (among others) from
the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) software stack.  Last
summer, the Geometa Lab organized the FOSSGIS 2013 conference in
Rapperswil (Switzerland) - the largest German speaking conference -
together with the FOSSGIS e.V. association [2], which represents the
OSGeo in the German speaking area.  One of the projects from the lab
related to Open Source and Open Data is the Kort game [3] . This is a
small gamified mobile web app for the improvement of OpenStreetMap. It
got some awards in 2013 and was translated in over 20 languages.

The Geometa Lab will actively support the initiative "Geo for All" [4]
and will fulfill the Memorandum of Understanding [5]  between OSGeo and
International Cartographic Association (ICA)  to share the goal of
developing on a global basis collaboration opportunities for academia,
industry and government organizations in open source GIS software and
data.

Visit the webpage of the Geometa Lab at HSR (see related weblink) for
further information including upcoming training courses.


About OSGeo and ICA:

Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) [6]  is a not-for-profit
organisation founded in 2006 whose mission is to support and promote
the collaborative development of open source geospatial technologies
and data.

International Cartographic Association (ICA) [7] is the world
authoritative body for cartography and Geographic Information Science.



[1]  http://www.ifs.hsr.ch/Geometa-Lab.12520.0.html?&L=4
[2]  http://www.fossgis.de/
[3]  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Kort_Game
[4] http://www.geoforall.org/
[5] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_ICA
[6]  http://www.osgeo.org/
[7]  http://icaci.org/