Porto Mapping Community
Hi!
I am writing this post to invite you to join this new community that is just getting started and to have a quick reference for some important information about it.
Porto Mapping Community is a meetup for all the people interested in maps and geographic information systems, the main idea is to create an ecosystem and a community around these topics.
Who should attend the meetup?
We will be very happy if all the following areas are represented in the meetup, but we believe that maps and spatial data are ubiquitous in the information age, so everyone is welcome
- Developers and engineers
- Academia: students and scientists
- Entrepreneurs
- Decision-makers
- Social and civil organizations
What is the purpose of this community?
We aim to empower and connect individuals and organizations in areas related to maps and geographic information systems. There is already a lot of work being done in these areas, maps are important for individuals, governments, and corporations, spatial information is a tool helping make better decisions in many areas. We want to help people benefit from the ever-increasing amount of data available in the form of web maps, geo-tags for social media datasets in geo-portals and many other sources of information. We want to make this technology less intimidating for newcomers and at the same time to help the people working with it to work happier, in more effective ways, and having a greater positive impact.
What is spatial data and geographic information systems?
Spatial data is information that depends on location information to be relevant. It can be coordinate referenced information of the kind used by GPS for navigation or government agencies to define land ownership (it needs to be as accurate as possible) or it can be more informal or even subjective (like local landmarks, “Where is the exit?” only makes sense in a given context). The important part of the information can be the location itself (ex. people looking for a restaurant) or some facts associated with that location (ex. people wanting to know if the restaurant they were looking for is open).
Geographic information systems are systems that deal with spatial data.
Where can you find us?
The main point of contact is a physical meetup that happens every three months in the city of Porto, Portugal, you can find more information in our Meetup group.
We will try to collect the topics discussed there and include them in a publication here for them to be accessible after the meetups but this is a work in progress and probably will take some time.
