GIS in Education Symposium: over expectation

Background: After the abolishment of the HUNGIS Foundation by the death of its director Dr. Rezső Berencei in 2008, the traditional series of the annual Symposium of the GIS in Education faced also to be in danger of the discontinuation after 18 successful years of operation. After the consultations between NGOs SZVT and HUNAGI as well as the Faculty of Landscape architecture of the Budapest Corvinus University which hosted the event during the past it was decided to keep this positive tradition in live for in the interest of the students, profession and the geospatial community of the country for the benefit of the society. The Symposium organised jointly by SZVT, the Budapest Corvinus University Faculty of Landscape architecture as well as HUNAGI was hosted by the BCU Buda Campus on 4th November 2009. Chaired by Mr. Richard Szabó of SZVT ( ) the event was opened by Prof. Dr. Attila Csemez, Dean of the Faculty. Representatives of the supporting organisers SZVT presidential member Richárd Szabó and secretary-general of HUNAGI delivered welcome speech expressing the goals and potentials of these NGOs how to build a bridge between the education and the real needs of the daily practice in a market environment.

Excellent presentations dealt with applications such as Noise mapping of the capital Budapest (András Muntag of EnviroPlus Ltd), GIS in societal assessments (Ákos Jakobi), Regional service provider for geospatial data in and for NE Hungary (Dr.Gábor Bartha, Dániel Soós), Opensource GI softwares (Dr. Attila Molnár), Raising spatial thinking - the impact of INSPIRE (Pál Lévai), R+TD in the EU to support INSPIRE and GMES: the Humboldt project (Dr. Dániel Kristóf), Visualisation in GIS (Zsuzsanna Hurton), GIS in the daily practice at a local government (Béla Szabó), Digital repository of the State Highway System (Ágnes Palotai). The highlights of the event were the two panel discussion on two topics:

a) Needs in GIS education, Awareness raising to strengthen spatial thinking, space-time assessment potentials, requirements from the enterprises point of view. The discussion generated and moderated by the Editor-in-chief terinformatika-online Dr. Szilárd Szabó was attended by invited people such as President of HUNAGI Zsolt Barkóczi, Director of MoD Mapping Nonprofit Company László Buga, Dean of the Budapest Corvinus University Prof. Dtr. Attila Csemez as well as representatives of Geodézia Shareholding Company (Bence Toronyi), Tekiré Ltd (Intergraph reseller) Zsolt Janovszky all HUNAGI members as well as the Zrinyi Miklós Home Defense University Ms. Erika Szabó-Szalánczi).

b) Graduated former students, shared their views on the barriers, difficulties and advantages based on their own experiences entering in the engineering practice.

The panelists graduated at the following universities: BME (László Gergely), BCE (József Molnár and Zita Szabó), ELTE (János Nyerges), Miskolc University (Dániel Soós) and Zoltán Zboray at Szeged University.

The event was used also for awarding the best diploma works of the year. Three certificates were issued for students

graduated at ELTE, Budapest, the Szeged University and Zita Szabó of the Budapest Corvinus University. (Names and themes will be added asap.)

The event has excellent atmosphere, active participants, and Catering, displayed takeaway brochures and additional surprises were offered by MoD Mapping Nonprofit Ltd, ESRI Hungary and Geolevel Ltd. All the presentations will be available at the website of SZVT, HUNAGI and summary will be surely available at www.terinformatika-online.hu edited by Dr. Szilárd Szabó.
Images: HUNAGI Visuals resource, 2009