The concepts are identified, now it’s time to start elaborate on them. And since the EO/GI technology is more and more applied in other sectors, our BoK will be linked to Bodies of Knowledge in other domains.
[Written by Marc Olijslagers — KULeuven]
The previous article explained how the work on the Body of Knowledge is organised. Since then, the first results have emerged. In 4 different workgroups focusing on different Earth Observation (EO) domains, a total of more than 500 new EO concepts are identified. Added to the already existing Geospatial Information (GI) concepts, this will result in a Body of Knowledge containing around 1000 concepts. In the next years the EO4GEO partners, together with a growing network of experts, will elaborate on these concepts, clearly defining them and linking to papers and articles with more background information. Furthermore learning outcomes will be defined for each concept and the relation between the different concepts will be detailed. From the beginning of June the network of experts is gradually more involved in this work and the first concepts are completely detailed.
Elaborating on 1000 concepts is a huge task. Therefore EO4GEO is still expanding its network of experts. This is done by organizing or participating in high level events where we meet these experts and explain the project. One of such events is the EO Summit organized in Leuven at the end of June, in parallel with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee meeting at the same location. This gave EO4GEO the opportunity to learn about the standardisation work done by OGC in numerous geospatial domains, while OGC experts learned about the different aspects of the EO4GEO project and they were invited to collaborate on the EO4GEO BoK. More information about the OGC Tc and the EO Summit can be found in the OGC blog. Interested experts in the Earth Observation/ Geographical Information Sectors are invited to contribute joining our network of experts.
Although the EO4GEO BoK is quite expansive, it describes only a limited part of the knowledge world. But Earth observation and Geospatial Information is more and more used in other domains (agriculture, climate change, disaster management, smart cities, etc.) and techniques from other domains are integrated in the EO world (Artificial Intelligence is a good example). Therefore it is a must to link our BoK to bodies of knowledge defined in other domains. A first set of such BoKs were identified and options to link to them were examined. By combining information of different BoKs the value of the information greatly expands. This is a clear example where 1 + 1 is greater than 2.
Tools developed within the project will be able to combine information from these linked BoKs.
And while the work on the content of the BoK is advancing, these tools and applications to exploit this rich information are further developed in parallel. The BoK content in combination with these tools will be shown in the next article.
