First International Workshop on WebGIS and Ecoinformatics

October 28, 2008 – October 30, 2008

At the     Indian Institute of Information Technology & Management, Trivandrum, Kerala, India

Sponsored by DAAD, Germany; KSCSTE, Kerala, India; Dept of Geology, Government College, Kottayam, Kerala, India

URL:http://www.iiitmk.ac.in/wiki/index.php/THREE_DAY_WORKSHOP_ON_WEBGIS_AND_ECOINFORMATICS%2C_October_28th_to_30th%2C_2008

Contact person: Dr.A.P.Pradeepkumar

Email     geo_pradeep@yahoo.com

Phone     0091-471-9895245380

Description

The purpose of the workshop is to introduce the participants to the power of Free and Open Source software in all aspects of GIS applications, from web visualizations to geostatistical processing. Its format involves live hands-on work with GIS tools on the computers by the participants lead by the workshop leaders Prof. Behr and Prof Schröder of the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences, followed by discussions. There would be a total of about 10 to 12 hours of such live sessions. The participants (limited to 40) will also have the opportunity to view the GIS solutions developed by IIIITMK for the Government of Kerala, India on an Open Source Platform. The workshop begins with an overview of open source desktop GIS tools for web-based analysis and presentation of spatial data. The pros and cons of the different tools will be discussed. The participants will have the possibility to work with some of the tools, and to perform some spatial analysis in  a guided case study. The tools used would be XAMPP (Apache, MySQL, PHP, PHPMyAdmin), Google Maps etc. There would be discussion on Geospatial webs: Google Maps, NASA World Wind, Google Earth and Microsoft Live Local 3D; Google Maps Client ; OpenLayers ; OpenStreetMap. In the second part of the workshop, an overview of the geo-related tools of “R” the free geostatistical software which works in tandem with GRASS GIS will be given, in particular tools for point pattern analysis and statistical surfaces will be discussed, and they will be compared to the Geostatistics tools of ArcGIS. In the hands-on part of this session, a short introduction to “R “will be given, and the participants will have the possibility to work with some of the spatial tools in a guided case study. Maptools, gstat and spatstat would be demonstrated. The Free GIS endeavour gvSIG (developed by Generalitat Valenciana, Sistema d’Informació Geogràfica of Spain) from the JUMP  (Java Unified Mapping Platform) family, including Raster Pilot and SEXTANTE tools for spatial analysis will be used to handhold participants through the use and power of Free Mapping Software.