Summary of geomatics issues discussed
Notes from Mike Goodchild
The geomatics breakout group had a wide-ranging and productive discussion. Education emerged early in the discussion as an important theme. One of the problems facing the EPSCoR states is a lack of a critical mass of people skilled and experienced in geoinformatics. While there are many courses available at the undergraduate level, and growing interest in GIS in the two-year colleges, the kinds of systemic change needed will only occur when there is significant exposure to the underlying principles of GIS at much earlier stages. Systemic change tends to be easier to introduce in a horizontal fashion, for example across all two-year colleges in a state, than in a vertical fashion. A vertical integration of geoinformatics instruction at all levels in the educational system of a region could be very influential.
Another theme that emerged in the discussion concerned the ability of GIS to support dynamic modeling of Earth system processes. Because of GIS’s roots in the map, there is inadequate support for temporal information, or for the kinds of rapid simulation of increments of time that are needed in dynamic modeling. Fields within Earth system science tend to have adopted general computing environments such as Mathlab rather than the specialized environment of GIS. But when models must be integrated between fields there is a much greater need for the specialized tools of GIS. One popular solution is to loosely couple a specialized simulation package with GIS. But development of new architectures and data models to support dynamic modeling has great potential as a basis for collaboration.
The Great Plains region has several unique characteristics that could form the basis for productive collaboration. It has high connectivity, because of the newly funded network. It has a significant node at the EROS Data Center, although EDC’s ability to play a leading role in regional research is limited by its mandate as a supplier of data. It has a wide diversity of excellent Earth system science research. These factors suggest that one very useful role for the region would be as a testbed for the kinds of distributed computing environments now being developed on the Internet. These include new specifications in support of interoperation of GISs, new ideas about the custodianship of software and data, and new arrangements for the protection of intellectual property. The group felt that the region has great potential as a testbed for these new developments in the context of geoinformatics and the support of Earth system science.
Notes on potential projects
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