The "Fifth International Symposium on GIS/Spatial Analyses in Fishery and Aquatic Sciences" is to be held in Wellington, August 2011. These symposia are held every three years, and are organised by the Environmental Simulation Laboratory in Japan.

There has been a clear uptake of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in these Symposia, since the first in 1999, when few there had heard of it, to 2008 when virtually everyone presenting was using some form of FOSS tools/libraries in their work. Symposium organiser, Brent Wood, is hoping some NZ projects using FOSS tools in this arena will be able to present their work.

With standards compliant tools like -

SpatialLite & PostGIS to manage spatial data, GDAL/OGR to import/reformat, QGIS, uDIG, OpenJump, gvSIG as desktop GIS browsers, GMT, GRASS, SAGA GIS & R as analytical & cartographic tools, mapserver, Geoserver, Deegree, OpenLayers, Mapfish for web mapping, Geonetwork for metadata management,

an Open Source suite can provide functionality rivaling or exceeding that of most commercial tools.

FOSS users/enthusiasts are generally good at presenting in FOSS venues, but Brent believes less so in trade shows and conferences which do not have a specific FOSS focus. Brent hopes we can showcase FOSS in the Fisheries/aquatic arenas in NZ.

The Department of Conservation, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research & Silverstripe are the local sponsors/co-organisers.

Initial info available at:
http://www.esl.co.jp/Sympo/5th/Final%20announcement.pdf

For more information contact:

Brent Wood
National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) Ltd
Private Bag 14901, Kilbirnie, Wellington, New Zealand
Email: b.wood@niwa.co.nz
Phone :+64 (NZ) (4) 386-0300 (from within NZ: 04 386-0300)
Fax :+64 (NZ) (4) 386-0574 (from within NZ: 04 386-0574)