Since yesterday, and until next week Wednesday, students in Athens can attend five courses that introduce open source geographic information solutions. A second aim of the training is to get schools to combine GIS solutions, OpenStreetMap and open government data.
The free courses take place at Athena ICT research centre. The courses are organised by the Greek Free/Open Source Software Society (El/Lak or GFOSS), in cooperation with the http://www.innovathens.gr/ municipality of Athens.
Yesterday’s class was attended by almost 40 students, reports GFOSS.
The course will introduce the QGIS and Grass GIS, and show how to build applications using these tools. Those interested to participate will need to bring a laptop computer, the organisers write.
“We will begin with a basic geospatial introdution”, El/Lak writes. Many practical examples will make attendees familiar with most aspects GIS and geospatial data. “As part of the course, we will combine geospatial data from OpenStreetMap and data from geodata.gov.gr to demonstrate the actual use and benefits of GIS.”
High schools
It is the second year that the GIS software development week is organised. The first open source code school was organized in early July of 2014, also at the "Athena" Research Center, says Thodoris Stratiotis, one of the organisers. Last year about 50 people took part, he says, the majority of which were teachers of high schools who wished to teach free and open source GIS software to their classes. “That is why we adapted the course”, the researcher says, “focussing on teaching power users to use free and open source GIS solutions in education.”
Fir this year’s open source GIS training, more than 60 participants signed up. This includes students of informatics, urban planning, geology and civil engineering, Stratiotis says. Attendees also include professionals and employees of the public and private sector. "Our focus is on training the local OpenStreetMap community, training developers on using geospatial services and API’s provisioned by open geospatial portal and training engineers of using GRASS GIS", researcher Stratiotis says.
More information:
GIS school code week (in Greek)
Innovation and Entrepreneurship campaign by the Municipality of Athens