[OSGeo-Announce] Welcome to 75th ICA-OSGeo lab - University of Salzburg

[Anne Ghisla]

We are pleased to welcome Z_GIS ,Department of Geoinformatics,
University of Salzburg [1] as our 75th ICA-OSGeo lab.  Z_GIS are one
of the leading centres of Geospatial education and research globally
with over 85 staff and one of the best examples of their global impact
and leadership is the distance education initiative offering masters and
diploma programmes in Geographical Information Science and Systems
through the UNIGIS [2] International Association.

They already contribute to Open Source Geo through both their teaching
within UNIGIS and MSc in Applied Geoinformatics (e.g. QGIS module)  and
research (they develop innovative applications based on OSM,
application-centric development of sensor web services architectures
etc). They also contribute to outreach through FOSS focused workshops
at AGIT [3], GI Forum [4] etc.

Dr Suchith Anand , chair of the ICA-OSGeo labs initiative said "This an
important milestone in our growth and we warmly welcome Z_GIS to our
initiative. Prof. Josef Strobl is also the Advisory Board member of
ICA-OSGeo Labs and we are looking forward to working closely with him,
Dr Hermann Klug and other colleagues at Salzburg for building up more
research and education collaborations and opportunities globally. Over
the last two years since the ICA-OSGeo labs initiative was launched, it
has grown rapidly thanks to the strong support of colleagues globally.
We now have strong presence in all continents expect Antarctica! Our
biggest growth country wise is in the United States of America (over
12) and region wise it is in Europe with over 30 labs joining our
initiative. Free and open GI software helps make geospatial education
available to students worldwide.  We thank all of you for your strong
support for this education initiative and it is very happy for us that
our initiative has now grown rapidly from very humble beginnings and is
helping to widen the benefits of geospatial education opportunities to
thousands of students worldwide. More details of our mission at
http://www.geoforall.org [5] "

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 GIScience.

[1] http://www.zgis.at/index.php/en/
[2] http://www.unigis.net 
[3] http://www.agit.at
[4] http://www.gi-forum.org
[5] http://www.geoforall.org
[6] http://www.osgeo.org
[7] http://icaci.org