CopHub.AC - Adressing an International Audience

At the 39th EARSeL Symposium we welcomed Romana Kofler from UNOOSA / UN 2030 to our panel discussion "The future uptake of space – ready for the future?". Together with representatives from ESA and the Copernicus Academy she provided interesting insights and experiences to the future developments of Copernicus and Earth observation programs.   

A technical presentation on behalf of Austria for the Working Group on the Space2030 Agenda was given by Barbara Riedler at the 62nd session of the Committee on the Peaceful Use of Outer Space (COPUOS) in June in Vienna.  Entitled “The Copernicus Academy – space hub for knowledge exchange, innovation and outreach” the presentation raised awareness and will hopefully lead to more registration to the Copernicus Academy!

Contact: Barbara Riedler

In Retrospect: Summer School Copernicus for Digital Earth 2019, Salzburg

The Summer School Copernicus for Digital Earth “Benefit from the potential of freely available Satellite data and Copernicus services for your domain” – organized by Z_GIS, UNIGIS and

CopHub.AC brought together international students and practitioners from 11 countries. The intense program explored the potential of freely available satellite data and derived information products with a focus on the European Earth observation programme Copernicus and its various service domains. Best practice examples were shown and practical experiences shared. In combination with international key speakers, hands-on sessions and field trips participants had the opportunity to discuss with experts. Finally  the summer school participants presented their group work in form of story maps at a Special Session the EARSeL Symposium and earned a lot of positive feedback!

Contact: Stefan Lang, Barbara Riedler

THE spatial view - from GI_Forum 2019 towards 2020 ...

Dear symposia attendees,
dear colleagues and friends,
 
after a busy, successful and highly interactive geospatial conference week in Salzburg, I’d like to summarize a few resources and highlights helping to ‘dig deeper’ and review some of the conference results and impressions.
 
Papers again have been published in online proceedings under an open access license:

• GI_Forum - http://austriaca.at/gi_forum
• AGIT - http://www.agit-journal.net/

  
If you want to check in with any exhibitors, please refer to this list - http://agit.at/agitexpo/ausstellerverzeichnis 
Special thanks go to our sponsors and partners listed on http://agit.at,  we appreciate and recognize their assistance making AGIT and GI_Forum possible!
 
To catch up on the poster exhibit you will find all at >https://agitposters2019.blogspot.com/?view=snapshot
Best poster awards went to:

1. „Visualising Vienna’s Underground - to the Core” - Kira Lappé, University of Vienna
   >https://agitposters2019.blogspot.com/2019/06/30-visualising-viennas-underground-to.html
2. „Geovisualisierung mit immersiven virtuellen Umgebungen – eine empirische Studie zum räumlichen Präsenzerleben in VR-Applikationen“ - Robert Ahm, University of Vienna
   >https://agitposters2019.blogspot.com/2019/06/02-geovisualisierung-mit-immersiven.html
3. “combineOBUS: Eine Potenzialanalyse für Mobility Hubs für die Stadt Salzburg und ihre Nachbargemeinden” - Eva Missoni-Steinbacher and Philip Straßer, University of Salzburg – Z_GIS
   >https://agitposters2019.blogspot.com/2019/06/50-combineobus-eine-potenzialanalyse.html

 
Best student paper awards this year went to:

• Maximilian Sesselmann “Deep Learning for Automatic Detection and Classification of Road Damage from Mobile LiDAR Data” >https://gispoint.de/fileadmin/user_upload/paper_gis_open/AGIT_2019/537669009.pdf
• Anita Graser “MovingPandas: Efficient Structures for Movement Data in Python” >http://austriaca.at/8609-0inhalt/A05_1108_FP_Graser.pdf

Traditionally, the Salzburg GI-Week serves as the platform to recognize outstanding theses, with winners of >http://www.ageo.at/ageoaward/ and >https://unigis.net/theses/winners-of-the-uia-academic-excellence-prize-2018/ given an opportunity to present their work. Congratulations to all awardees!

Every attendee had the chance to test their competitive spirit and geographical orientation in the satellite image quiz, if you missed this and want to check yourself >http://bitly.com/satquiz-english - no prizes to be won anymore now, though 😉

Finally, to review visual impressions from the conference week, explore and enjoy this online album >https://www.flickr.com/photos/uni-salzburg/albums/72157709399534151/, or check your twitter feeds with hash tags #AGIT2019 and #GIForum2019.
 

Numerous special events of all kinds happened around AGIT/GI_Forum, just to highlight one directed at a wider public audience: a ‘ground control point’ for checking everyone’s smartphone location accuracy was inaugurated at >https://kontrollpunkt.bev.gv.at/salzburg-nawi, >https://flic.kr/p/2gr3QDx documented by BEV >https://portal.bev.gv.at/portal/page?_pageid=713,3129510&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL 

I am confident that you’ve not only had a great time in Salzburg but also had a chance to develop and update insights, knowledge and skills in our rapidly evolving domain of geospatial methods and technologies reaching across so many fields of applications. Looking forward to staying in touch, and to hearing about your ideas and suggestions for #AGIT2020, scheduled for July 8-10 and GI_Forum 2020 starting on July 7.
 
On behalf of everyone at Z_GIS and in particular our ‘Team AGIT’,
Josef Strobl

Success Story of the Doctoral College@Z_GIS

Dr. Pablo Cabrera-Barona has been appointed as Full Professor at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO), one of the most prestigious universities in Latin America and the Caribbean dedicated to research, teaching and spreading of social sciences. 

Pablo has graduated from the Doctoral College in GIScience@Z_GIS in 2017 with a dissertation on Multidisciplinary Spatial Frameworks for Health Inequalities Analysis with Emphasis on Deprivation and Healthcare Accessibility. 

This professorship is within the Department of Public Affairs, with main teaching duties in the programmes of Urban Studies and Climate Change.

Congratulations and all the best for your continuing academic career!

EO Summit – Trends, Curricula, Skills Strategy for the EO*GI Sector

The EO Summit has been held together with the OGC Technical Committee Meeting in Leuven, Belgium between June 25 and June 27, 2019. The EO Summit was a dissemination event of the EO4GEO project, organized by KU Leuven. Three main topics have been in the center of discussion:

•    technological trends and the potential of a trends watch,
•    curriculum design rooted in work processes,
•    the space/geospatial sector skills strategy.

As Z_GIS leads the activities related to curriculum design, the provision of input for the discussions around this topic was in the hands of Z_GIS team members: Barbara Hofer, Jochen Albrecht and Florian Albrecht. Curriculum development in the EO4GEO project builds on illustrations of work processes that name performed tasks and involved stakeholders. From these illustrations, key occupational profiles are derived that require modest or comprehensive skills and competencies linked to the EO*GI domain. Curricula – for various qualification levels and for various forms of training – can then be designed taking the requirements of job profiles into consideration. Jochen Albrecht emphasized the potential for organizations of making work processes explicit as this may provide insights on the efficient use of resources. Florian Albrecht talked the audience through the specific work process example of landslide mapping.

In a break-out session, participants discussed work processes that EO4GEO should focus on with specific emphasis on the sub-sectors of the project: climate change, smart cities, integrated applications.

Stay tuned about updates from the EO4GEO project by subscribing to the EO4GEO newsletter or following the twitter channel EO4GEOtalks.

E2mC ::: Final Review and Social Media based Hot Spot Maps

E2mC Final Review: Social Media Real-time Hot Spot Maps of Natural Disasters and their Applications

The final review meeting of the Evolution of Emergency Copernicus services (E2mC) project together with the last E2mC user workshop took place in Geneva, Switzerland from 13 to 14 June 2019. The presented use cases by the E2mC consortium to the project officers led to discussions about the concrete exploitation of the impressive results – for instance, an integration into the existing Emergency Management Service (EMS). Additionally, the following user workshop showed the interest of a wide variety of stakeholders from different ecosystems (humanitarian, satellite mapping, or emergency management) in the project.

Particularly the real-time use cases Hurricane Michael and Florence showed the potential of the various modules of the new “Witness” component created in the E2mC project. For example, the social media based geospatial-semantic analysis module developed by the team of University of Salzburg produced hot spot maps within a day after the landfall of the hurricanes (s. figure below), supporting emergency services to delineate the affected areas. During hurricane Florence the team created further hot spot maps that show the temporal development of the disaster, allowing for more accurate predictions.

Due to its modular nature, the Witness component can be integrated into Copernicus EMS but also in other systems that monitor events for humanitarian aid.