During the recent flooding events that took place in Colombia during the Winter of 2011, decision makers became aware of the great possibilities offered by the ICDE (The Colombian National SDI) to manage natural disasters. A properly functioning SDI offers access to spatial information useful for evaluating the magnitude of a disaster, the extend of the areas affected, the amount of population and infrastructure affected and the environmental and social impacts. In this Webinar, specialists from the Agustin Codazzi Geographic Institute of Colombia offered examples of how ICDE was leveraged during the recent floods to obtain spatial information, map flooded areas and disseminate data to local decision makers on the ground, among several other benefits of the Colombian SDI.

Click here to enter the Webinar: https://caf.webex.com/caf/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=70502787&rKey=2e427520c9b6714e

The GeoSUR Program offers the possibility to specialists from Latin America and the Caribbean to take advantage of training courses offered by ESRI on its Virtual Campus. Nominees should submit an email with the following information

• Name of course
• Cost
• Name and coordinates of nominee
• Institution
• Role in institution (to judge relationship with GeoSUR)
• Justification (how the person plans to use the skills acquired)

Nominations should be send to:
Eric van Praag
Coordinator, GeoSUR Program
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

More information about the Virtual Campus on: http://training.esri.com/gateway/index.cfm

The GeoSUR Program conducted a virtual workshop on medatata administration. The workshop took place from September 17th through October 21st, 2012 and it covered 40 hours of effective training. The workshop agenda included topics such as the use of metadata standards, introduction to SDI concepts, metadata creation and editing, implementation of metadata catalogs and registration with the GeoSUR Portal. 40 participants from 35 national entities from 20 countries participated. The workshop was offered in Spanish, we hope to organize a similar workshop in English in the near future.

The training was made possible thanks to the financial support of CAF - the Latin American Development Bank, the administrative support of PAIGH - the Pan American Institute of Geography and History and the technical support of the Spanish Geographic Institute (SGI) and IGAC - the Colombian Geographic Institute. The SGI offered the trainers, the teaching material and the technological platform that made this training possible.

Specialists from Geomatico, a Spanish company that provides support in open source geospatial platforms offered an introduction to the OpenGeoSuite platform on January of 2012. The OpenGeo Suite is a complete web mapping platform built on powerful, cutting-edge, open source geospatial components that include, among others, PostGIS, GeoServer, GeoWebCache, OpenLayers and GeoExt. The Webinar is only available in Spanish.

View the webinar in: https://caf.webex.com/caf/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=61322637&rKey=a673f9217ae4ff3e

Professor Luc Boerboom from the University of Twente, Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), offered a Webinar on the use of decision-support tools on January of 2012. Dr. Boerboom showcased a distributed and open-source platform developed by ICT to assist planners and decision makers to undertake development decisions using geo-information. Prof. Boerboom explained how the platform has been put to use in Asia for planning road development and in Europe for informing forest policy. Participants showed interest in the potential use of the tool in Latin America and the Caribbean.

View the webinar in: https://caf.webex.com/caf/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=61719592&rKey=5b7db9d4614d06ea

Specialists from ESRI offered a brief introduction to the ArcGIS.com platform and explained its main components in November of 2011. ArcGIS online is a cloud-based, collaborative content management system for maps, apps, data and other geographic information. Participants discussed how the platform could be used in Latin America and the Caribbean and how partner agencies could upload selected datasets to it. The ESRI presenter mentioned that the company is building a version of ArcGIS online for enterprises, to be released in the second quarter of 2012.

View the webinar in: https://caf.webex.com/caf/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=58939442&rKey=56ab6f0ec273d9ee