Summary of BoF Geospatial Information meeting at RDA 3rd Plenary meeting
26th March 2014, Dublin
 

Around 30 participants (mainly from Europe, North America) participated in the BoF session on Geospatial Information on 26th March 2014 at RDF3  . The BoF Session was chaired by Simon Cox (CSIRO).  The aim of the meeting was to bring together those who were interested in this theme to discuss ideas for moving forward.   All participants briefly introduced themselves  and their interest in the theme.

The Geospatial Interest Group  proposal was presented by Suchith Anand (University of Nottingham) at the BoF. Geospatial Interest Group is a domain oriented interest group to work on all issues related to geospatial data and we will work with the wider geospatial community to finetune the proposal (including those who were not able to attend RDA3). Presentations from Simon Cox (CSIRO), Phil Archer (W3C) and Andrex Perego (European Commission) at the meeting helped give the bigger picture of various activities happening in the geo domain.

Though there has been lot of  developments and advances in geo data collection through mobile communications, sensor platforms, spatial search, and pervasive computing but still, the inter-disciplinary research needed to transform raw data into useful intelligence, to improve the planet's environmental, economic and societal well being, remains constrained by a range of barriers - disciplinary, organisational, historical, and a non-existent or non-rigorous approach to quantifying uncertainty in collected datasets. The Geospatial interest group aims to bring together  all major stakeholders producing, managing, aggregating, sharing and consuming data for geospatial research and innovation for building synergies and accelerating future developments. Efforts will be made to get an active participation of the major international institutions . These include the various commissions of the ICA, OSGeo, OGC , the joint W3C/OGC WG, a number of W3C community groups (Cartography, Geometry API, Geospatial Semantic Web, Places, SVG mapping) working in the geo field, which all work on different aspects of geospatial research and innovation. It will take stock of existing problems and experiences and will pave the way for a number of domain specific working groups to make precise proposals for solutions in specific areas. This interest group will help to promote good practices in our research domain : data sharing policies, data management plan, data interoperability, quantifying uncertainty in datasets , how to make geo data re-usable across domains, and to work towards cross-domain interoperability of location information.

The meeting was attended by the following RDA members:

              Name                              Affiliation

    Ester Conway                        STFC/NCEO (UK)
    Parinaz Ameri                        KIT (Germany)
    Christopher Jung                  KIT (Germany)
    Roger Proctor                         IMOS (Australia)
    Christian Muller                     B.USOC (Blegium)
    Marko Peterson                     UT (Estonia)
    Tim Duffy                                 BGS (UK)
    Andrea Perego                       European Commission
    Matt Harrison                          BGS (UK)
    Tim Haithcoat                         MSOIS/GRC- UMC
    Bart Jagers                             Deltares
    John Howard                          University College Dublin
    Robert Cartolaro                    Columbia University (USA)
    Phil Archer                              W3C
    Tom Bunting                           Contractor for APA
    Natalie Mayers                       Uni. Of NorteDame
    John Watkins                          NERC (UK)
    Fergus Olayis                         Osaka University (Japan)
    Gary Berg Cross                    SOCOP
    Dimitra Mauraki                      Hellenic Centre for Marine Research
    Francourse Pearlman           IEEE
    Bebte Lilda Dye                      BLB, Norway
    Johanne Schwart                   Springer-Verlag
    Rubard Budich                        MPI for Meterology
    Chris Hill                                  University of Southampton
    Suchith Anand                         University of Nottingham
    Simon Cox                               CSIRO (Australia)

Actions:  Suchith to coordinate with the wider geospatial community for finalizing the proposal for Geospatial Interest Group and work to establish this IG in RDA for building synergies and accelerating future developments.

We would like to thank Simon for helping organise this excellent GI session at RDA and all speakers and participants.