The IAAA Laboratory invites high-quality applications for a 1-year (extendable), full-time research contract in the area of distributed and collaborative geospatial information systems. We are looking for applicants with a Master degree (level 7 in the European Qualifications Framework) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Geomatics or related disciplines, possibly interested in pursuing a PhD. The candidates must be able to move to Zaragoza (Spain) for the duration of the contract, and must be legally authorised to work in Spain for that time period. Besides this, fluency in either spoken English or Spanish is required.

Deadline for the application: September 2, 2019

Funding: monthly gross salary around 1.250 €

Time period (expected): October 1, 2019 - September 30, 2020

Applications must be submitted via e-mail to iaaa@unizar.es, including a brief presentation and motivation letter (a limit of 1000 characters). The candidates must provide the following documents in a single PDF document as an attachment:

  1. A CV.
  2. Degree certificates (Bachelor and Master), including a transcript of the grades.
  3. Other relevant qualifications: certificate of Spanish or English competence, technical or scientific publications, etc.

All documents must be provided either in English or in Spanish.

Description

The candidate will participate in the design of a collaborative and distributed geospatial information system within the COLABOTUR project), and will implement a prototype to evaluate its functionality, usability and performance. The geospatial information in the system will be modeled and georeferenced on a Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS). The system will provide at least one application that will allow users with little or no experience on geographic information systems to mark off geographic areas of their interest that can be easily shared with others on the Internet, and edited in a collaborative fashion by multiple users with minimal coordination among them.

The research will consider the storage and efficient access to large volumes of multi-resolution raster data by multiple users making concurrent reads and writes on them. On the other hand, mechanisms and models will be designed in order to provide contents for the areas of interest created in the system on the DGGS, and algorithms to detect, and implement, possible fusions, combinations, generalizations etc. of them, automatically when possible.

Experience with one or more of these technologies will be highly valued:

  • Spatial databases, especially PostgreSQL/PostGIS.
  • NoSQL databases, especially those array-oriented or graph-oriented.
  • The Python programming language, along with its main scientific libraries such as Numpy and Pandas.
  • The ecosystem for the development of web information systems in Java: the Java or Kotlin programming languages, the Spring framework etc.
  • Technologies for the development of web geographic information applications: JavaScript (or TypeScript), web application development frameworks such as Angular or React, FLOSS web mapping libraries, such as Leaflet or OpenLayers, and FLOSS geographic application servers such as Geoserver.
  • FLOSS tools and libraries for the manipulation of spatial data, such as QGIS, GRASS, GDAL etc.