[tdwg-tag] FOSS4G and Biodiversity

[Javier de la Torre]

Dear all,

I dont know if you have heard of a conference called FOSS4G about open source software for GIS (http://2010.foss4g.org). This year the conference just happen to be in Barcelona, very conveniently. This is the most important conference for the GIS open source community and you can find there all the projects around it. The conference really has a nice atmosphere and I believe you get to learn a lot. For example on things like PostGIS, Geoserver, QuantumGIS, Openlayers, etc...

Because of 2010 is the international year on biodiversity I am trying to push the participation from the biodiversity informatics and conservation community on it. I know lot of organizations on this community are moving into Open Source recently, so I think this is a great place to discuss challenges, experiences etc.

The idea is to have enough people attending from this community to create a side event specific to biodiversity. Last year for example they created one event around interoperability of projects on Climate Change. What about something similar for biodiversity?

The deadline for paper submissions and presentations is in 2 days, I know it is tight, and it would help me a lot to get support from the organizers if we get a decent submission on biodiversity/conservation topics.

Considering that Biodiversity is deeply linked to Geospatial information I think it could be a great venue to push the requirements from our community into the development of Open Source GIS that most of us are using anyway.

If you need help on the process of submitting or in creating the abstract, please let me know. And if you submit one also let me know so that I can tell the organizers and group them.

Here is the URL by the way:

http://2010.foss4g.org/presentations.php

Thanks!

Javier de la Torre
www.vizzuality.com