IAG on the Internet

The IAG maintains an Internet site, which is a valuable source of information not only about the Association itself, but also about its scientific disciplines. The primary goal of the website is to communicate with the IAG members, and make information available to the wider Geosciences community in the world as a whole.

The IAG maintains an Internet site, which is a valuable source of information not only about the Association itself, but also about its scientific disciplines. The primary goal of the website is to communicate with the IAG members, and make information available to the wider Geosciences community in the world as a whole.

Since the maintenance of the IAG website belongs to the activities of the Communication and Outreach Branch (COB) it is still hosted at the Department of Geodesy and Surveying of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) with the HAS-BME Research Group for Physical Geodesy and Geodynamics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS), Budapest, Hungary.

During the past four years, the website has been continu-ously improved. Some new features have been added to it, which are discussed here.

Members’ Area

Each IAG Individual Member gets automatically a login name and a password after processing his/her Member-ship Application Form. The login name is always the e-mail address specified in the form, while the password is generated automatically. The login section to the Members’ Area can be found on the right side of the IAG opening page. 

After logging in, one can access the IAG Contact Database as well as some publications available only for the members of the IAG.

IAG Contact Database

The contact information of each IAG Member has been stored in a relational database. Every member has the privilege to update his/her own contact information. The information is generally classified (except the name and the country of origin). However one can decide to make some contact details (phone, e-mail, postal address) public. In this case all the other IAG Members can see the selected contact details. 

The Individual Members can specify as well their fields of interest in Geodesy. This may enable the COB to send announcements, publications or other information directly to the appropriate members. 

Individual Members can query the database, too. Using the Find a Colleague option, one can select IAG Members according to Name, Institution, Country and Fields of interest. 

The IAG COB has recently started a campaign to gather contact data from anyone, who is working in, or inter-ested in Geodesy. These data sets will be stored in the IAG Contact Database in the future, in order to add more international contacts and ease the building of inter¬national contacts and help to create international co-opera¬tions. Those Colleagues, who are not Individual Members of the IAG, will be able to update their own contact information on the web, but the privilege of query¬ing the database will be limited to IAG Members only. 

The IAG Forum

The IAG Forum is a billboard service of the IAG Web¬site. It was established in 2004, but had only marginal number of visits in the last 3 years. During these years the Forum was public, anyone could post articles to it. However due to the large number of spam, the COB decided to create a private Forum for the IAG Individual Members only. In the near future each IAG Individual Member will get a username and password to be able to login to the private IAG Forum. More information on the Forum will be available on the IAG Website and in the IAG Newsletters.

The IAG Office

The IAG Office maintains an own website, mainly for internal IAG users, at http//:iag.dgfi.badw.de.