User:Vnatraj

Natraj Vaddadi

I have a Master's degree in Geology and have recently been introduced to Open Source software in Geosciences. Besides the work experience, I have been an adjunct faculty in Petroleum Technology for over 30 years now.

I am also a founder volunteer for Centre for Education & Research in Geosciences (CERG) an initiative whose main efforts are geared towards increasing awareness, understanding, appreciation and application of Geosciences and Geospatial technologies and their importance in an individual’s day to day life and communities at large. see CERG

I have attended FOSS4G-Asia, 2017 conducted in Hyderabad and since then have been engaged in training activities related to OSGeo related technologies. I am presently working on developing training content and workshops for the use of ODK for societal needs.Presently also developing learning materials especially for ZOO-Project and currently engaged in documentation for mobile and Web-GIS tools for Mapping and evaluation and organising training/workshops/ in collaboration with OSGeo India and OSGeo Thailand. I have also translated the ODK Collect app to an Indian language (Marathi) and am also working on the translation to two more Indian languages.

MOBILE-WEB GIS APPLICATIONS FOR MONITORING & EVALUATION (M&E) - AUGUST 2017 - BANGKOK

More recently I was a key facilitator at a workshop - Mobile-web GIS applications for Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) which was the first workshop jointly conducted by OSGeo Thailand & Geoinformatics International. I am also presently working on two projects using ODK tools - Groundwater wells and water harvesting potential in the Pune metropolitan area and mapping of Landslide prone areas in Western Maharashtra. For these projects we plan to use crowd sourcing methods for data collection

DISCOVER GIS - 12th & 13th of October 2017

A two day workshop on QGIS was planned,organised conducted on 12th & 13th of October 2017 as a part of the Geoweek celebrations. QGIS is a cross-platform free and open-source desktop geographic information system (GIS) application that supports viewing, editing, and analysis of geospatial information on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD. The workshop was open to all though senior Graduate & Post graduate students & facilitated by Dr. Kuldeep Kurte & Sh. Abhishek Potnis of CSRE, IIT, Mumbai. All successful participants of the workshop were awarded certificates. I was instrumental in organising the same.

'FOSS4G Tools for Participatory Field Data Aggregation - 18th August, 2018

Conducted the above workshop along with Ravi Kumar Vundavalli. The workshop included a brief introduction to FOSS4G tools and provided details of installing and using field data collection applications running on Android devices. Demonstration focussed on applications namely, Open Data Kit (ODK) is a free and open-source set of tools which help organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions.

The following applications / uses of ODK were detailed out in the workshop • Building a data collection form or survey • Collecting the data on a mobile device • Aggregating the collected data on a server and extract it in useful formats.

In addition to socio-economic and health surveys with GPS locations and images, the use of ODK to create decision support for survey teams & for building multimedia-rich nature mapping tools & environmental monitoring was emphasized.