FOSS4G 2023

Open Source for Geospatial Software Resources Platform for Geospatial Data Exploitation – OSS4gEO: community led Open Innovation at ESA and beyond
06-29, 14:00–14:30 (Europe/Tirane), UBT F / N212 - Floor 3

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.

Stefanie is an Earth Observation Application Scientist at the European Space Agency. She is passionate about exploring and fostering interesting ideas and projects at the intersection of open spatial data science and earth sciences. She is fascinated by cutting edge-technological advancements in the fields of Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics and Remote Sensing and focus her work on how these advancements can be used to solve problems due to global change in the 21st century.

Stefanie is a strong advocate for Open Innovation, Software, Data and Platforms at ESA and a proud member of the open source scientific software community. She is a core-developer and steering-council member of the Python Spatial Analysis Library (PySAL) and a OSGeo charter member. Since 2018, Stefanie has been a contributing member to the Python Software foundation.

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.

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