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: applications in Earth Sciences and recent development.

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 utilises and/or is related to 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: The necessity of public geodata in research co-operation

Notes:

Open access to geographic data - information available to use, re-use and redistribute without legal or financial constraints - is growing in importance in scientific and research communities. Open source software and open standards for data exchange and query are rapidly accelerating what can be achieved by sharing and recombining data more openly.

Within the Open Source Geospatial development community, simple protocols for data exchange, discovery and reuse are developed iteratively through the best practise of experts. Collaborative production of metadata models and ontology maps for different domains enable kinds of re-use and discovery that restore a spirit of research to data investigation. Academics and scientists may find striking new realisations once their data can be combined in as many different ways with as many different data sets as possible.

Public geodata is largely that whose collection and maintenance is paid for by the state. New technologies allow for a more distributed data truthing and gathering process by locals familiar with the terrain. Between the public domain model whose financial support is being threatened in the US; and the European model which has largely featured a proprietary, "cost-recovery" attitude towards data maintenance; there is a middle way. This symposium will look at methods for practically avoiding the negative effects on data availability and reuse that a proprietary, protective licensing policy towards geographic data may cause. It provides a forum to explore the barriers and facilitators around reuse of geographic information.

The symposium also effects to gauge interest within the geomatics community in establishing an precedent for Earth Sciences interoperability of data and standards across Europe. In the US, the Conservation Commons ( http://conservationcommons.org ) and Information Commons for Science ( http://informationcommonsforscience.org/ ) may be strong models to look forward to.