Become an EO4GEO expert, contribute and be acknowledged as BoK developer!

Authors: Rob Lemmens, University of Twente, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), Enschede, The Netherlands; Agata Hoscilo, Institute of Geodesy and Cartography, Poland; Estefania Aguilar-Moreno, Universitat Jaume I de Castelló, Castelló de la Plana, Spain; Martyna Stelmaszczuk-Górska, Friedrich-Schiller University Jena; Marc Olijslagers, KU Leuven, Belgium.

The EO4GEO project is building a community around Earth Observation (EO) and Geographic Information (GI) sectors, and participating as an EO4GEO BoK expert to support the elaboration of the Body of Knowledge (BoK) is the best way to start interacting.

Professionals and academics who have knowledge and experience in the EO and GI sector are very welcome to become EO4GEO experts. In compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), potential experts can register themselves through the EO4GEO Call for Experts.

During the registration, the expert indicates the field of her/his expertise to which she/he wishes to contribute to. After analyzing expert profiles, registered experts get access to the Living Textbook and can contribute to parts of one or more concepts, by adding or editing concept descriptions, external resources or adding skills that are relevant to that concept. The Living Textbook environment allows experts to manage and keep an overview of the content by checking the completeness of concepts and the discussions initiated by other experts through the Living Textbook editing facility (see Figure 1) and by generating progress exports. Relationships between concepts can also be changed and new ones can be proposed.

All edits are done in a so-called Sandbox environment, which allows contributors to store partial content and comments. Its content will be reviewed on a regular basis by an editorial board before it is publicly released. As the BoK is continuously updated, these releases contain completed concept descriptions and ones that are in progress, as well as new and planned ones. Also as our domain evolves, like most others, new concepts will appear and others will disappear or will be merged.

Up to now, over 200 experts expressed their interest in joining the EO4GEO expert’s fleet. The active experts contribute to the development of the BoK. Experts participate in the development of the BoK within the seven working groups as described in this article. Their distribution over the working groups can be seen in Figure 2.

As acknowledgement for their contributions, experts can benefit from visibility, networking and early access to EO4GEO outputs.

The most straightforward way of acknowledgement is the publication of the list of contributors on the Bok Website (at this link). And within the BoK each concept lists its contributing experts. This latter option entails the possibility of quoting and linking concepts making use of permalinks.

EO4GEO is supported by a strong group of associated partners, mostly consisting of associations and networks active in the EO/GI fields, members of industry and academia, an Advisory Board of individual experts and BoK Experts. This network of networks is established in view of the Erasmus+ Sector Skills Alliance call and will continue after the end of the EO4GEO project, since it reflects the complex space/geospatial ecosystem that already exists and currently maintains a rich infrastructure of space data and services under the Copernicus programme. As mentioned, participating in the process of developing BoK content and collaborating on deploying its content, provides early access to EO4GEO products. Therefore, new opportunities for collaboration during and beyond the EO4GEO project could arise. Examples could be seen in the authorship of a joint publication (Stelmaszczuk-Górska et al, 2020) and the preparation of project proposals to the next European Framework Programme.

In the next BoK development phases, experts will have the opportunity to join the efforts to develop the BoK within the announced call for concepts. Groups of experts will work together to elaborate and integrate related concepts over the boundaries of the different working groups. This will bring us step by step towards our end goal, a fully elaborated BoK for EO and GI.

So, please register, stay tuned and follow our activities!