Open GIS Symposium

The Open GIS Symposium and Summer School was held in Chania between 20th-24th July 2015 with participants from many countries, mostly European and African. The event started with the Open GIS symposium which included a number of interesting talks on the value and the future of GIS and some posters about recent GIS-related work and applications based on real-life needs. The summer school included an introduction to the geographical data science and then it mainly focused to open source software like QGIS and ARCSWAT. QGIS (Quantum GIS) is a cross-platform free and open-source desktop geographic information system (GIS) application that provides data viewing, editing, and analysis capabilities. The popularity of QGIS is being increased rapidly the last years in the scientific community because it is a strong tool with a user-friendly interface that allows the user to construct, manage spatial data and process layered maps. Both raster and vector layers and supported. The last two days there was an overview of QGIS based on coastal, hydrological and beach morph dynamic models and field work day in order to gather data. A number of use cases for these models were discussed and examined throughout the summer school.

Mr Alexandros Gougousis and Mrs Matina Nikolopoulou from LifewatchGreece participated in the Symposium and in the Summer School in to gain experience on gathering, analyzing and exploiting spatial information. This experience was of high value to LifewatchGreece regarding spatial data management and quality control, as well as the development of web applications (e.g MedOBIS vLab) that make use of spatial data.