On April 28, we were able to attend the Work Plan Symposium of the Group on Earth Observations. During these sessions we learned about current activities to make geospatial information more accessible. The primary target users of the GEOSS (GEO System of Systems) are researchers and policy makers, however, we can imagine how, in the future, the accessibility of data will inspire people who provide services to business and the public at large will also want to use the data.
We were particularly impressed with the session on the data sharing principles. The GEOSS Data Sharing Activitiy is developing infrastructure and proposing policy to the data providers and consumers/users.
During the session about Science and Technology Commnity, Hans-Peter Plag explained to the audience how he sees the concept of "Human sensor" networks, involving crowd sourced data, leading to data integration at a level never seen before. This visionary speaker called for cross-community activities and warned that there are competitive activities simply due to the fact that certain audiences are unaware of GEOSS work to date. Hans-Peter Plag is an IEEE volunteer working in the International Committee on Earth Observations.
We also learned about user-driven data GEOSS activities which are highly appropriate to showcases such as 3D Geospatial Geneva. During this session there was a presentation about the EU-fuded CITY-SENSE project that uses mobile sensors to collect data and create a citizen observatory. This seems very complementary to the SmartSantander project.