Map Middle East 2007 concludes

The three-day event, held under the patronage of the Deputy Ruler of Dubai, UAE Minister of Finance and Industry and Chairman of Dubai Municipality Sheikh Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, was attended by more than 1000 delegates from around the world and 27 exhibitors participated in exhibition held alongside the conference.

The event, jointly organized by Dubai Municipality and GIS Development, saw the presentation of a number of work papers on vital issues related to GeoSpatial technology.

The GIS Students Educational Forum, also held during the event was attended by more than 400 students from all over the UAE during which 18 teams consisted of students presented their research projects.

Dr. Hanif Hassan, the UAE Minister of Education was the guest of honour at the project presentations on Wednesday. Eng. Essa Al Maidour, Assistant Director General of Dubai Municipality for General Projects Affairs and Dr. Vanessa Lawrence, Director General of the Ordnance Survey of Britain also attended the GIS Students Educational Forum and honoured the sponsors and the supporters of the Forum.

Lawrence announced the names of the winners of the map drawing competition. For the first time this competition was held at the GCC level and five winners each were selected from each GCC state. They are now qualified to participate in the international map drawing competition, Barbara Petchenic Children's World, held under the sponsorship of UNICEF in Moscow in August this year.

The five winners from the UAE are Abdulrahman Mohammed Abdulrahman, Rashid Ibrahim Khamis, Maryam Rashed Hareb, Iman Awadh AbdulAleem and Khalid Ali Zayed Ali.

Mohammed Al Zaffin, Chairman of the Organizing Committee of Map Middle East 2007 and Director of Dubai GIS Centre honoured the authors of three best work papers declared at the end of the event. The winners include Dr. Rainer Malmberg of BSF Luftbild GmbH, Germany, who presented his paper titled, "Modern Techniques for Airborne Data Acquisition," Dr. Ismail Iro of Abuja GIS (AGIS), Nigeria, who presented his paper titled, "Demographic pressure and the application of GIS in land reforms: the case of restoration of Abuja Master Plan and sanitization of cadastral land registry," and Dr. Mohamed MR Mustafa of NavMatica Corporation, Canada, who presented his paper titled, "QA/QC Procedure of large airborne mapping projects Canada."

Among the exhibitors, Intergraph and Topcon shared the first place for the best exhibitor award. The second and third places went to the stalls of Trimble and Al Ain Municipality respectively.

The Geospatial Executive Leadership Forum held along side the event with the theme "GeoSpatial Enterprises" was participated by personalities from leading organizations from the geospatial industry and academia and spoke about project management, leadership challenges and various successful business development strategies.

Map Middle East 2007 also hosted an exclusive conference on Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry under the umbrella of the International Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.

A Round Table Discussion on Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) reviewed the status of SDI activities within the various organizations using Geo-information on local and national levels.

Different seminars held as part of the event covered the ongoing construction boom, growing demands for oil and gas and the geospatial world moving towards open source in terms of software/data and standards.