[OSGeo-Discuss] Importance of Open Geospatial Science for our discipline

[Suchith Anand]

Dear Colleague,

As some of you know , there is pre-AAG workshop on  "Open GIS: New Opportunities for Research and Education" on Monday (7th April) that Prof. Sergio Rey (Arizona State University) and  Prof. Daniel Sui (Ohio State University) are organising. The primary goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia, industry, and government agencies to discuss the new opportunities and set the agenda  for Open GIS research and education in light of new advances during the past five years.  An edited volume is planned based upon the talks given at this workshop.

The two background papers for the AAG meeting which might be of interest to you

Open Regional Science by Sergio J. Rey
http://sjrey.org/_downloads/ors_address.pdf 

Opportunities and Impediments for Open GIS,Transactions in GIS
Volume 18, Issue 1, pages 1–24, February 2014
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tgis.12075/abstract


It is only rarely fundamental changes happen in a discipline and OpenGIS is the fundamental change that has happened in Geospatial Science. The pace of change has been much beyond our expectations and i thank all universities who have already established and those in the process of establishing Open Source Geospatial Labs and all our colleagues in "Geo for All" initiative.

Our aim is to empower staff and students worldwide by using Free and Open Source GIS for education. What is the point of teaching GIS to students (in both developed and developing countries) and taking away the tools from them after the course and telling them that now you need to buy these expensive proprietary software licences if you want to continue using them after their course (which is what the proprietary GIS vendors would like !)

I am determined  to do everything in my  abilities to make sure we can keep the windows of opportunities open for geospatial education for all students worldwide and for our future generations. I am looking forward to work with you on this.

Best wishes,

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