IGC2008

Proposal for a symposium at the 33rd IGC Geoscience World Congress 2008
Geoscience World Congress 2008

http://www.33igc.org/ (Oslo 2008)

Deadline: 31. August 2006 (!) - Pre-proposal for 28th.

Proposed:
 * GFOSS Session
 * Public Geodata Session

GFOSS Session
Title: Free and open-source geospatial software in Earth Sciences

Description: An immense amount of spatial data is collected by earth-scientists every year, including information collected during field-work, geophysical and remotely sensed data, maps, etc. This information has to be stored, interpreted and, ideally, published and shared within the Earth Sciences community. To tackle this challenge without the help of dedicated geospatial software and networks is unthinkable. Unfortunately, proprietary software-solutions tend to be expensive or downright unaffordable for scientific institutions, particularly in less developed countries. However, during the last two decades several alternative software packages were developed in the open-source community and are now available for free. The functionality of these highly flexible software solutions includes, amongst others, classical GIS and remote sensing task, virtual reality and geospatial databases. This symposium attempts to provide a forum to present and discuss all aspects of scientific work in Earth sciences which utilised free and open-source geospatial software.

Proposed convenor (preliminary, to be defined):

Markus Neteler Center for Scientific and Technological Research MPBA/SSI Via Sommerive 18 38050 Povo (Trento) Italy e-mail: neteler AT osgeo.org

Contact:

Henning Lorenz Department of Earth Sciences Uppsala University Villavägen 16 75 236 Uppsala Sweden e-mail: henning.lorenz AT geo.uu.se

Public Geodata Session
Title: Fuller co-operation through open geodata

... to be defined ...

Notes:

(Open Source, Open Standards and Open Data reinforce each other.)

Simple protocols for data exchange, discovery and reuse developed iteratively through expert practise; collaborative modelling and ontology mapping of different data domains - all faciltated through open source standards oriented efforts built using public domain data.

Avoiding the negative effects on data availability and reuse that a proprietary, protective licensing policy towards geographic data. In interest of academics and scientists that their data can be combined in as many different ways with as many different data sets as possible.

Interest in this community in establishing a precedent for Earth Sciences interop across Europe - consider similar US efforts - http://conservationcommons.org and http://informationcommonsforscience.org/

This symposium provides a forum to explore the barriers and facilitators around reuse of geographic information.


 * better access to state-collected geodata
 * value of open geospatial data standards
 * avoidance of negative effect by a license, copyright and protection oriented policy towards sharing geographic data