Meeting on Development and Sharing of Open Geodata

Open geodata is the idea that certain geospatial and Earth Observation (EO) data should be freely available to everyone to use, re-use and redistribute without restrictions like copyright or patents, but with requirements such as attribution and share- alike. It is considered as a best practice for modern geo-information and EO research in line with Open Science and FAIR principles. However, developing easily accessible (e.g. cloud-optimised) and re-usable (big) geospatial datasets, and sharing them "effectively" with the research community and other stakeholders is challenging and usually requires a team effort including researchers, research software engineers, technology advisors, and community managers.

Collaboration between research institutions to share technical and practical know-how on best practices, as well as lessons learned while developing and sharing open geodata, supports such efforts and helps in developing an open data culture for open research and development communities. The meeting on “Development and Sharing of Open Geodata” aims to initiate such a collaboration between ITC and OpenGeoHub, by bringing both institutions together to present state-of-the-art research activities with a focus on open geodata, discuss the needs and challenges, and pursue collaboration opportunities especially to produce joint datasets and software.

OpenGeoHub is an independent research foundation (a DeepTech organisation) with 20 staff, primarily data scientists and technical experts, located at the Agro Business Park in Wageningen. It focuses on promoting open data and open source software solutions to support regional and global projects, and currently leads the Open Earth Monitor and Eco Data Cube, and is also involved in the Land Carbon Lab project led by WRI.

Date

18 January 2023

Venue

ITC Auditorium (Hengelosestraat 99, 7514 AE Enschede) or Online

Questions and Comments

Please use the online collaborative document to pose your questions and indicate your comments during the event.

Programme

9:45 – 9:55	Welcome and opening (Prof. Dr. Freek D. van der Meer, Dean ITC) Introduction and overview (Dr. Serkan Girgin, ITC-CRIB and Dr. Yijian Zeng, ITC-WRS)
9:55 – 10:20	ITC and 4 Profiling Themes Presentation on ITC and its 4 profiling themes (Prof. Dr. Karin Pfeffer, Portfolio Holder Research ITC) 15 min presentation + 10 min Q&A
10:20 – 10:45	OpenGeoHub Presentation on OpenGeoHub Foundation and its open geodata activities (Dr. Tomislav Hengl, Director OpenGeoHub Foundation) 15 min presentation + 10 min Q&A
10:45 – 11:00	Coffee break
11:00 – 12:30	Presentations of ITC and OpenGeoHub projects Open Earth Monitor: a cyberinfrastructure bringing together key open source developers in Europe (Dr. Tomislav Hengl, OpenGeoHub) EcoExtreML + WUNDER: Digital Twin of soil-plant system (Dr. Yijian Zeng, ITC-WRS) EcoDataCube for Europe: combining spatiotemporal ML and open EO data cubes (Dr. Leandro Parente, OpenGeoHub) Towards a Global Multitemporal Data Set of Glacier Outlines using Deep Learning and Cloud Computing (Prof. Dr. Claudio Persello, ITC-EOS) Open Data on Deprivation - Modelling Urban Poverty (IDEAMAPS Framework) (Dr. Monika Kuffer, ITC-PGM) 15 min presentation + 3 min Q&A for each project.
12:30 – 13:30	Lunch
13:30 – 14:15	Presentations of ITC and OpenGeoHub projects AI4SoilHealth: accelerating collection and use of soil health information using AI technology to support the Soil Deal for Europe and EU Soil Observatory (Dr. Ichsani Wheeler, OpenGeoHub) Open geospatial data publication at ITC (Masoome Shariat, ITC-FB) 15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A for each project. 5 min plenary Q&A.
14:15 – 14:45	Plenary Discussion Needs and Challenges of Developing and Sharing Open Geospatial Datasets
14:45 – 15:00	Coffee break
15:00 – 16:00	PhD's in the Spotlight Lightning presentations of PhD candidates with a focus on datasets that will be developed during their studies. Space-time modeling of vegetation in a changing environment (Carmelo Bonannella, OpenGeoHub) Global long-term daily 1 km surface soil moisture dataset with physics-informed machine learning (GSSM 1km) (Qianqian Han, ITC) Big and Useful Maps: Land use / land cover classification with high thematic depth (Martijn Witjes, OpenGeoHub) Microwave Remote Sensing for soil moisture estimation and vegetation characterization with Physics-Informed Machine Learning (Ting Duan, ITC) Mapping land potential / tracking land degradation using EO data (Julia Hackländer, OpenGeoHub) HRVQA: A Visual Question Answering Dataset for High-Resolution Aerial Images (Kun Li, ITC) Mapping soil health indicators with EU soil database (Xuemeng Tian, OpenGeoHub) An overview of the process for publishing data: Spatiotemporal dynamics of domestic wastewater (Nestor De la Paz Ruiz, ITC) 5 min presentation + 2 min Q&A for each PhD candidate.
16:00 - 17:00	Drinks

For more information or questions, please contact dr. ing. Serkan Girgin (s.girgin@utwente.nl).