For anyone in the vicinity, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is having a Geospatial Rights Management Summit at MIT later this month!
J. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Jonathan, I wonder if you would send the invitation below to the people on your Open Knowledge Foundation list. Some of them may be interested in attending the OGC's Geospatial Rights Management Summit to be held on June 22 at MIT in Cambridge, MA. I believe the work of the OGC's Geospatial Rights Management Working Group (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/geormwg) and the OGC's development of an open architecture for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/initiatives/geoss/ogc) are critical enablers of a new era in which all types of geospatial scientific data will aggregate into a permanent and increasingly important knowledge resource. The benefits -- which I think are extraordinary -- are outlined after the press release below under "Open Access to Geospatial Data," extracted from an article by Dr. Mike Jackson et al. I helped found the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in 1994 and continue to serve the OGC as a consultant. Lance McKee 10 Circuit Avenue East Worcester, MA phone/fax: 508-752-0108 cell: 508-868-2295 [email protected] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT For information, contact: Sam Bacharach Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc tel: +1-703-352-3938 [email protected] OGC Announces Geospatial Rights Management Summit May 6, 2009, Wayland, Massachusetts.The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC®) invites participation in an OGC Geospatial Rights Management (GeoRM) Summit to be held June 22, 2009 at the Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Geospatial data and services -- Earth images, GIS, map browsers, location services, navigation, etc. -- have become an integral part of our information environment. But this progress raises issues of security, public access, intellectual property, and emergency use of geospatial information. The issues are complex because geospatial data products are often composed of data from multiple sources which may have different rights and restrictions associated with them. Thus, business and policy issues, not technical issues, are now the industry bottleneck. "The OGC's Geospatial Digital Rights Management Reference Model (GeoDRM RM) provides a framework that enables much more than today's ‘all or nothing' protection," explained Graham Vowles, chair of the GeoRM Working Group ( http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/geormwg ) of the OGC Technical Committee. "This has important implications for governments and scientists whose data would have far more value if the data could be readily shared." "Standards based on the GeoDRM RM will open up many new opportunities for geospatial data and geoprocessing service businesses," said Mark Reichardt, the OGC's president and CEO. "We are holding this summit to give multiple stakeholder communities an opportunity to see how they can benefit from developing and using GeoRM standards." For OGC GeoRM Summit information, agenda and registration, see http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/090622georm. The OGC's June 2009 Technical Committee meeting week also includes a Sensor Web Summit ( http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/090624swe ) hosted by the OGC's Sensor Web Enablement Working Group and a 3D Fusion Summit http://www.opengeospatial.org/event/0906233dfusion ) hosted by the OGC's 3DIM Working Group. The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 380 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/. _______________________________________________ (The paragraphs below are excerpted from "The Evolution of Geospatial Technology Calls for Changes in Geospatial Research, Education and Government Management", by Prof. Mike Jackson, University of Nottingham; David Schell; and Prof. D.R. Fraser Taylor, Carleton University. The article was published in Directions Magazine 2009-04-07 http://www.directionsmag.com/author.php?author_id=568 .) Open Access to Geospatial Data Academics and those who fund their research should be acutely interested in the proposition that geospatial data developed for scientific purposes can be, in a Web environment, a resource whose value increases with the number of researchers who use it. Geography has always been interdisciplinary and GIS has always been a tool for combining data from different sources. All geodata refers to some aspect of the same Earth. If researchers properly document, archive and publish their data and methodologies using available Web technologies, standards and best practices, many benefits accrue: a) Improved opportunities for cross-disciplinary and longitudinal studies. This is key. Geography is inherently cross-disciplinary, and a main underlying theme in modern science is the relatedness of phenomena. We need interdisciplinary and longitudinal studies to help us address critical problems such as resource depletion, climate change, population, pollution, disaster management and adequate provision of food, water, shelter and energy. b) Improved verifiability of results. Science requires that experiments be replicable, and therefore experimental data must be available. In the context of the standards regime described above, details of methods and semantics become more accessible for review. In this new environment, GIS and remote sensing studies will be less vulnerable to the accusation that pretty maps are being used to cover up poor experimental design or biased reasoning. Climate science made more verifiable will be harder to discredit or ignore. c) Improved Web-based data publish/search capabilities. These make much more data available and enable more efficient assessment of data. In most cases, literature searches will be a much less efficient way to discover data than direct data searches using online catalogs, because researchers looking for previously collected data often do not know which bodies of literature to search. For example, data collected by an ornithologist may include temperature readings that would be valuable to a hydrologist. d) Improved ability to re-use or repurpose data for new investigations, reducing redundant data collection, increasing the value of data and creating opportunities for value-added data enhancement. The value of data increases when the data can be re-used or when they can be collected with the intention of serving multiple research purposes. This benefits the public and those who fund scientific research, and brings a greater return in terms of the general application and use of science. It benefits data owners, who may be able to charge for use of the data they generate or who may add value to it to provide more useful and saleable products. e) Improved opportunities to collaboratively plan data collection/publishing efforts to serve multiple defined and undefined uses. f) Improved rigor and transparency regarding data collection methods, processing methods and data semantics. The SensorML standard makes the processing chain transparent. Generally agreed upon conventions for describing data and methods (such as data reduction) contribute to clarity and rigor. g) Improved ability to discover spatial relationships. Researchers will surely browse data and become curious about patterns they notice. Robust data descriptions and quick access to the data will enable more rapid exploration of hypothetical relationships. h) Improved ability to characterize, in a standardized human-readable and machine-readable way, the parameters of sensors, sensor systems and sensor-integrated processing chains (including human interventions). This enables useful unification of many kinds of observations, including those that yield a term rather than a number. i) Improved ability to "fuse" in-situ measurements with data from scanning sensors. This bridges a historical divide between research communities that have focused mainly on either unmediated raw spatial-temporal data or spatial-temporal data that is the result of a complex processing chain. j) Improved ability to "chain" Web services for data reduction and analysis, and improved ability to introduce data into computer models that use multiple inputs from remote data stores or real-time data feeds. k) Improved ability to encode sensor data in the ISO Feature Model (ISO 19109). This is just one of the ways in which the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards will enable scientists to leverage off-the-shelf, standards-based tools for data modeling and management, just as they currently use commercial spreadsheet and database programs. l) Improved societal and institutional return on investment of research dollars, and improved ability of research funding institutions to do due diligence and policy development. m) More efficient scientific debate and accelerated pace of scientific discovery, as automation and new institutional arrangements reduce the amount of time spent on data management, freeing researchers' time for more creative work and more communication with other scientists. In the bioscience world, a similar vision has been put forward and steps toward it taken by the Science Commons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Commons), founded by Lawrence Lessig. The Science Commons champions “Open Access” (OA), and OA was a key enabler of the Human Genome Project. Geospatial academics worldwide ought to note also the significance to the research community taken by the recently installed Obama administration in the US, which has resulted in the appointment as co-chairs of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Harold Varmus, co-founder of the Public Library of Science and former director of the US-NIH, and Eric Lander, a lead researcher in the Human Genome Project and founding director of the Broad Institute (a joint MIT and Harvard institute which addresses the effectiveness of “a new, collaborative model of science focused on transforming medicine)". Varmus is one of the most high-profile advocates of Open Access and the role of government in providing open access, and both the Human Genome Project and the Broad Institute are practitioners of open data. In this context, is it not then obvious and provocative to consider the potential importance to geospatial information science of recognizing the GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems), within the US federal government as well as the world scientific community, to be an initiative that is similar to and as important as the Human Genome project? -- Jonathan Gray Community Coordinator The Open Knowledge Foundation http://www.okfn.org _______________________________________________ geo-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/geo-discuss
