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You might have noticed that we have been offline for a couple off weeks due to our move to a new server. Pretty much everything should be working again now, so please let us know if you come across any problems.

The University of Münster (Germany) offers a senior researcher position at the Institute for Geoinformatics (http://www.ifgi.de) to coordinate the work of the Sensor Web & Simulation Lab (http://swsl.uni-muenster.de).

The working group’s research is focused on the building blocks of the geosensor web and distributed geoprocessing. We are actively contributing to OGC’s standardization process and are conducting several exciting projects in this area.

Check out details about the job offer here:
http://swsl.uni-muenster.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/job-offer-swsl-post-doc.pdf

The weekly German newspaper Die Zeit (English Wikipedia entry) has a nice column called Deutschlandkarte – map of Germany. Every week, the column presents visually appealing maps on no-so-common topics such as distribution of organic famers, gas pipelines to Germany and statistics on the number of stolen bikes per city (no wonder Münster is number one in this category). It’s all in German, but the maps in the archive are definitely worth a look, even if you do not understand the text.

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There is are a bunch of local conferences, but the three below seem to be the most popular one.

First Open Source GIS UK Conference in Nottingham, UK - 22 June 2009. This conference is organized by the Centre for Geospatial Science of the University of Nottingham and aims at a broad audience ranging from industry to research.

OGRS 2009: International Opensource Geospatial Research Symposium in Nantes, France - 8-10 July 2009. This conference seems to have more a research focus and the accepted papers are published as a Springer book.

FOSS4G 2009: Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial in Sydney, Australia - 20-23 October 2009. Truly the biggest conference this year for open source software in the geospatial domain.

Please choose the one, which suites you best.

OSM 2008: A Year of Editsby ItoWorld is a very impressive and appealing visualization of all the edits made on Open Street Maps in 2008. Some hi-res stills from the CC-licensed video are available on Flickr.

CC-Comic by Geek and Poke. I’m not sure whether this is related to what Tobler had in mind…

Sad news from one of the biggest Open Source map client frameworks: The mapbuilder community decided to stop developing the framework, as announed in this post. This is mostly due to the fact, that OpenLayers got so popular and the overlap between those two projects got so significant, that there does not seem to be a need to have two competitors for MapClient frameworks within OSGeo.
Myself, I did like MapBuilder, as it was so easy to configure and did not require any knowledge about browser scripting and all this. You just configured your XML map context document and you were ready to go.
Anyway the mapbuilder community will release a last stable version of the framework called 1.5. The ppl working on mapbuilder will contribute to the OpenLayers project (as they already did in the past), so maybe some nice features of mapbuilder might appear in OpenLayers in the future.

The Universities of Münster, Bremen and Buffalo have announced a new joint international research training group on semantic integration of geospatial information, starting October 2008:

With this International Research Training Group (IRTG), we address 
problems arising when integrating geospatial information from 
multiple sources to reason and support decisions about the 
human environment. These problems are situated in the overall 
research challenge of supporting effective geospatial reasoning 
across age and cultures. The common scientific thread of the 
entire program is the ambition to create computationally 
tractable solutions to problems of semantic integration.

The program offers 6 PhD and 2 post-doc positions. If you want to join us in Münster (or the group in Bremen), have a look at the details (PDF).