Codrina Ilie
Codrina Ilie is a technical geographer, an open source GIS/RS power user, actively working in improving open data services development at Terrasigna. In her 12 years of activity, Codrina has essentially focused on using open source GIS and RS solutions for data management, processing and visualization. As an advocate for foss4g, since 2010 she has been a volunteer trainer in the Romanian geospatial community, geo-spatial.org. Since 2013, Codrina has been a Charter Member and today serves the community as an OSGeo Board of Directors member, within her second term.
Sessions
In our allocated 15 minutes, we would like to take you on a trip following the winding roads of building a community, the Romanian geospatial community: geo-spatial.org. We want to share our story, beyond our geodata and knowledge portal, to the very core of the values and principles that have guided us through difficult times and made our overcame challenges even brighter.
In our more than a decade of existence, we’ve organised over 25 national FOSS workshop, a regional FOSS4G in 2013 and a global FOSS4G in 2019, we’ve initiated collaborative geo-related projects and managed to infuse the geospatial component in various non-spatial organisations, such as the ones in education or investigative journalism.
In this talk we introduce a European initiative with global effects that aims to support the uptake of Earth Observation (EO) data products and services by increasing European capability to generate timely, accurate, disaggregated, people-centred, accessible and user-friendly environmental information based on EO data. The initiative - Open Earth Monitor Cyberinfrastructure - is following a well defined workflow:
(1) Identify gaps and needs analysis : finding out what are the bottlenecks of data platforms together with stakeholders;
(2) Use open source EO computing engine : integrating EO with in-situ data to obtain improved geospatial data services and products;
(3) Build better data portals: harmonise, bridge and improve existing open source platforms;
Make data platforms FAIR: improve accessibility of data with open source licences and capacity building;
(4) Serve concrete goals: all Open Earth Monitor activities are centred around pre-defined use cases with various stakeholders.
We do not plan to reinvent the wheel, therefore all our efforts will focus on improving existing open source solutions and other initiatives, such as: OpenEO.org, Geopedia.world, GlobalEarthMonitor.eu, EarthSystemDataLab.net, OpenLandMap.org, EcoDataCube.eu., LifeWatch.eu, XCUB and EuroDataCube.com. Our developments will materialise in a series of monitoring tools at European as well as global level in various fields: forestry, natural hazards, biodiversity, crop monitoring etc.
In the context of Open Earth Monitor, Cyberinfrastructure is defined as the coordinated aggregate of software, hardware, human expertise and other technologies required to support current and future discoveries in science and engineering, enabling relevant integration of often disparate resources to provide an useful and usable framework for research, discovery and decision-making characterised by broad access and "end-to-end" coordination.
Open Earth Monitor Cyberinfrastructure has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101059548. (HORIZON-CL6-2021-GOVERNANCE-01).
Our talk presents an initiative that works to develop an open, interactive, user intuitive platform for a constantly updated, comprehensive and detailed overview of the dynamic environment of the open source digital infrastructure for geospatial data storage, processing and visualisation systems. OSS4gEO is designed as a repository that functions as an extended metadata catalogue, curated by the community and a tool for metrics computation, visualisation, ecosystem statistical analysis and reporting.
The initial development of the Open Source for Geospatial Software Resources platform builds on previous extensive work started in 2016 that has materialised into a pioneering overview of open source solutions for geospatial, voluntarily updated by the team. Starting in 2023, OSS4gEO has become a part of a wider ESA EO Open Innovation initiative to actively support and contribute to the EO and geospatial open source community and it is intended as a seed action to better understand, represent and harvest the geospatial open source ecosystem.
There are 3 main objectives that OSS4gEO aims to achieves:
(1) It aims to offer an informed and as complete as possible overview of the open source for geospatial and EO ecosystem, together with various capabilities of filtering and visualisations, within the platform as well as technical solutions to programmatically access and extract data from the database (APIs) to use in any purpose, including commercial;
(2) It aims to provide guidance through the complexity of the geospatial ecosystem so that one can choose the best solutions, while understanding their sustainability, technical and legal interoperability and all the dependencies levels;
(3) It aims to serve as a community building, a promoting and maintaining platform for new and innovative open source solutions for EO and geospatial, developed within various projects, research centres, small or large companies, universities or through individual initiatives.
Our talk will outline the OSS4gEO initiative as a community-led, bottom-up initiative, highlight current and future developments and co-development activities and introduce the wider ESA EO Open Innovation context.
In January 2022, OSGeo and OGC signed a new and updated version of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that aims to maximize the achievement of the mission and goals of the two organizations: promoting the use of Open Standards and Open source software within the geospatial developer community. Identifying open source technologies that could be used as Reference Implementations for OGC Standards and validating OGC compliance tests are examples of activities that can take place within the scope of the agreement.
More than one year after the agreement was signed and almost one year after it was introduced to the OSGeo community in a keynote at FOSS4G 2022, this presentation will summarize all activities accomplished and future plans, including the establishment of the OSGeo Standards Committee within OSGeo and the organisation of the 3rd joint code sprint, in Switzerland, together with the Apache Software Foundation.
The presentation will also reiterate the benefits of the new agreement, which allows OSGeo charter members to represent the priorities of OSGeo in the development of OGC Standards and supporting documents and services.