Hi All.
I am writing to explore potential for collaboration with OSGEO to obtain news and other SDI related content, for inclusion in the regional monthly newsletters published by the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association http://www.gsdi.org/.
Each month, three regional newsletters are published by the GSDI, for Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America and the . The aim of the publication is to collate and share information relevant to folks interested in SDI in these regions. The Centre for SDI and Land Administration at has recently taken on the production of the AP newsletter and I have been asked to act as editor.
In the past, the SDI newsletters have attempted to cover a broad spectrum of geospatial news – projects, data, events, technology, applications, grants, jobs etc. We are currently reviewing the AP newsletter focus, style, content and content collection process, with an aim of obtaining more SDI-focused material that more directly supports the goals of the GSDI.
In order to provide some context to news items, I would like to include more editorial and opinions and thus provide a picture of what goes on “under the hood” of SDI/web mapping. A URL to a web mapping application is useful to communicate what is being done but providing additional information that broadly describes the how would be really useful. The target audience for the newsletters are those in the AP region trying to build towards SDIs so the under the hood view is crucial to them.
Several ideas for the new look newsletter are:
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to develop regular features from key communities e.g. OGC round-up, Open source round-up, possibly UN
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a series of thematic features e.g. what is GML and why is it important in context of SDI, coordination mechanisms/governance of SDI, an SOA primer etc. The aim of these would be to assist colleagues in developing nations to navigate the complex SDI landscape and conceptually stitch together the different technology and other components of an SDI.
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National SDI round-up – spotlight on specific countries with an update of activities, achievements, issues, challenges
As the OSGEO community plays such a key enabling role in SDI implementation, I wanted to explore ideas with you as to how best to interface with your community to obtain content. Currently, the editors simply trawl the web, monitoring certain sites and filtering RSS feeds. There is currently very little content actively submitted by contributors at least in the Asia Pacific region.
In the next issue of the AP newsletter, available at http://www.gsdi.org/newsletters.asp from April 1, I have pulled together a few OSGEO news items. FYI, the newsletter contains an article on an SDI for in built using open source s/w that could be a useful case study. press release http://www.hindu.com/2008/02/17/stories/2008021750750200.htm - project site - http://www.edugrid.ac.in/webgis/webgis.htm
Given the importance of the OSEO community, particularly in developing nations that are turning to open source geospatial solutions, I wanted to explore ways in which your community could communicate key messages/issues/developments to the broader (and largely less technically-minded) community.
Specifically I would be interested in exploring possibility of OSGEO:
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Provision of a regular feature monthly/quarterly from OSGEO on trends/themes/issues in your space, with pointers to relevant resources
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Contribution of thematic features article and or op/ed contributions
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the above and am pretty open to ideas.
Cheers,
Paul
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Paul Box
Centre for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Land Administration
Department of Geomatics
The University of Melbourne