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OSGeo UN Committee Educational Challenges

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OSGeo UN Committee Educational Challenges
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A use case of sharing software and experience from all over the world
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295
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CC Attribution 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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The OSGeo United Nations (UN) Committee promotes the development and use of open source software that meets UN needs and supports the aims of the UN. Following a meeting between the OSGeo Board of Directors and the UN GIS team at the FOSS4G conference in Seoul, Korea, in September 2015, the Committee has mainly worked on the UN Open GIS Initiative, a project "... to identify and develop an Open Source GIS bundle that meets the requirements of UN operations, taking full advantage of the expertise of mission partners including partner nations, technology contributing countries, international organisations, academia, NGOs, private sector". In 2018, the OSGeo UN Committee called for proposals for developing open geospatial educational materials as a part of its activities. There were three challenges: the first two (one of them sponsored by Boundless) are related to the UN Open GIS Initiative. The first challenge, related to UN Open GIS - Spiral 1, aims at the development of education material that teaches users how to apply the GeoSHAPE platform. GeoSHAPE is a free and open source geospatial collaborative platform created from various open source projects. The developed material provides a guide on how to create, edit and share critical data on an integrated dynamic map in near real time, view map updates by users from anywhere in the world and use GeoSHAPE exchange in connected and disconnected environments. The course is structured with content to suit novice, intermediate and advanced users. The second challenge supports UN Open GIS - Spiral 3, which provides geo-analytical solutions for the UN. The feasibility of the analytical functions developed as part of Spiral 3 were tested against an Ebola Epidemic use case. Requirements for developing suitable applications and methodologies based on actual UN operational cases were defined in 2017. Members of the UN Open GIS - Spiral 3 developed a geo-analytical library, called "Processing Toolbox", which is a plug-in for uDig, an open source desktop GIS. The training material developed in the frame of the OSGeo UN Challenge provides an introduction to the use of the algorithms for environmental analysis in the uDig Processing Toolbox, specifically those related to ecology and ecosystems identification. The training material for Spiral 3 is designed as a step-by-step tutorial, using algorithms in the uDig Processing Toolbox. While working through the tutorial, the user is familiarized with the tools covering all the available macro sections. After completing the tutorial, a user will be able to find the needed algorithms to solve a specific use case. The presentation deals with the description of the UN Open GIS Challenge and the open training materials developed under this initiative. The material is available under an open license and can therefore be reused by anybody.
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
So, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming and interest on this topic, the geoanalysis and all the papers on academic track.
So we have three presentations in this session. The first one will be given by Sylvia Friend-Chesney. And also we have many co-authors here. So the first presentation is introducing the OSGO-UN Committee Educational Challenges. That is one of the activities supporting UN Open
So please welcome Sylvia with big hands. 20 minute presentation, 5 minute Q&A and 5 minute between the speakers. Okay, let me know if I am late.
Okay, so thank you for coming, good afternoon. So my presentation will be about my experience in the OSGO-UN Educational Challenge of 2018. So, first of all, let me try to introduce myself.
I am an environmental engineer, specializing in hydrology and hydrology and forestry. I have a PhD in environmental and agriculture and developed scientific model for in the field of hydrology, hydrology and forestry. I am also a co-founder of a very small engineering company which is called Hydrology.
We are based in Italy and I am also an OSGO chapter member. And last year in 2018 I won the OSGO-UN Challenge spiral tree.
So during this presentation I will introduce you the OSGO-UN Committee and then in particular the challenge of 2018 and then we will go a bit deeper with the description of the aims and the results of the challenge number one and three.
And then we will see some future steps and some results of my experience. So the USGO-UN Committee promotes the development and use of open source software that meets
UN needs and support the aims of UN. And one particular project, the most important project of this committee is the UN Open GIS initiative which is a project to identify and develop an open source GIS bundle that meets the requirements of UN operators taking full advantages of the experience of
mission partners including partner nations, technology contributing, countries and international organization, academia, NGO and private sectors. If you want to know some more details about this program and the OSGO committee in
particular, you can go to the OSGO Wiki page dedicated especially to this committee. The project UN Open GIS initiative in particular is organized into working groups
and these working groups are called spirals. And there are four spirals. Spiral one focuses on a new open source web platform for data collection. Spiral two focuses on capacity building. Spiral three is related to new functionalities needed by the UN staff for field operations.
And spiral four focuses on data in general from the collection to the assessment and integration in the systems. In 2018, it has been launched the first USGO-UN educational challenge.
It aimed at addressing the lack of training material for using the open source data set and open source software in supporting the UN sustainable development goals. There were three challenges in particular. The first challenge was related to spiral one and it was dedicated to the development
of documentation for the geo-shaped platform for data collection. Challenge number two related to spiral number three covers some functionality for UN operators.
And challenge number three was related to open geospatial data and software for the UN sustainable development goals. The winners of these challenges were guided by mentors of the OSGO-UN committee in developing the material.
The criteria for the evaluation of the candidates were the membership of OSGO. So if the participant was an OSGO chapter member, the documented experience
in education and training, the age, younger participant were favorite respect to older and the experience respect to what it was proposed in the particular specific challenge.
So this was in general about the challenges. And now we go a bit in deep with challenge number one and challenge number three. Challenge number one was strictly related to spiral number one and in particular it was dedicated to the development of documentation for geo-shape.
Geo-shape is a platform designed to enable collaboration on geospatial information between mission partners in connected and unconnected environments.
The main objectives of geo-shape are to create, edit and share critical data in integrated environment and dynamic map and share dynamic map in real time, to view map updates by the user from anywhere in the world
and to work in connected and disconnected environments. This is an example of the training material. The training material has been developed and published in the Wiki page and the course is structured with the content to suit all the levels of users
from novice, intermediate and advanced users. Regarding challenge number three, this was related to spiral number three which is the spiral which involves experts from different institutions in a collaborative way and using a common platform, open source platform.
The aim is to develop a spatial analysis function to support the United Nations peacekeeping operations. In particular to collect the request from the UN operators and develop a spatial analysis in two kinds of systems,
as primitive spatial analysis algorithms and then integrating these algorithms in a spatial analysis model as an integrated environment working online and offline. And then the last but not least object
is to develop the training material for this open source spatial analysis function and then to train UN operators on these tools. The developed training material is a full documentation available online
on the Wiki page of OSGEO and also as a PDF to download and it is based on a data set containing free open data which are data from satellite images, digital terrain model and vector layers.
The area covered as an example is an area around Seoul in South Korea and the training material has been developed with the purpose to introduce a user to the algorithm contained in this processing toolbox,
particularly focusing on environmental analysis related to ecology and ecosystems identification. The tutorial contains the description of the tools,
the usage of the tools and a set of tools within a path to analyze raster and vector data with the processing toolbox. And the material is complete. You can follow it step by step considering there is the description of the module,
the scientific meaning of the module and then the graphical interface and a description of the input and output and some images of the output. So you can really follow it and check if your results are the same
as those expected by the tutorial. This is an example of the training material. This is the full training material. And then, for example, I wrote the documentation to cover some preliminary operation to harmonize the data
because all over the world you can have data from different sources and of different coordinate reference systems. So it covers operation like reprojection and clipping. And regarding the imagery analysis,
in particular we analyzed Landsat 8 images and there are operations to do some statistics on this data, the elaboration of the NDVI index, the reclassification of the data and the possibility to merge the different bands of the same satellite.
Regarding the digital terrain model analysis, again it covers some statistics, zonal statistics, spatial relationship
to understand which is the content of the data and then some morphological analysis, very easy morphological analysis like slope, curvature, roughness and until the elaboration of the terrain roughness index. And it is possible there are also operations that relate vector layers
and raster layers like assigning some specific values of a raster layer to a vector layer. But regarding only the vector data, there are interesting statistics
like point pattern analysis, the nearest neighbor index, the kernel density and then the nearest neighbor distance and there is also the possibility in this tutorial and in the tools to expertise charts like histogram and scatter plot.
So this is almost everything, a very short description of what we did in 2018. Future steps are regarding the OSGEO committee.
The first one is the launching of the challenge 2019 and this year there were two challenges. The first one dedicated to the update of POSGIS training material and the second one dedicated to in general open just spatial data
and software for reaching the UN sustainable development goal in peace, justice and open institutions. They have been assigned and they are working on the documentation.
In particular, future step for spiral number three is the development of open, of user friendly web interfaces for the common platform including the outcomes of other spirals
and then the development of new training material and maybe starting to train the UN operators using this training material and the new one that will be developed.
So I think we can do some conclusion of my personal experience, my personal and the experience of the other winners of the challenge and also of the mentors is that it is possible to work, different experts can work from different parts of the world
and collaborate for the same project even if there are no personal meetings working only online and then we realize that training material has to be written by persons
that are experts in both the science and the use of the software. Otherwise, the training material will miss some steps and for the user is a bit harder to follow it and understand what it means.
And then also one conclusion is that to have a good documentation it is better to develop a quick start tutorial and not full manuals
because a user will be lost in a full manual instead of following step by step a quick tutorial. And in general, in any case, the challenge in 2018 contributed successfully
to the OSJO UN Committee's aim which is to promote and develop the use of open source software meeting the UN needs and supporting the aims of the UN. So, thank you.
She finished her presentation very on time. Just 20 minutes, exactly. Okay, so no questions.
No questions? No questions. Okay, I have more than one question. So, since this challenge started last year, what kind of plan for continuing this activity this year, next year,
personal and also on behalf of the OSJO Committee? Is there any plan? Okay, this year, the OSJO Committee launched the new challenge of 2019
which has been assigned. I personally tried to participate but I didn't want this year. So, I'm trying to go on. In any case, what I do, my activity of writing documentation is still available
and I continue with this activity with other softwares, hoping that some of this software meets also the UN requests. Thank you. So, still I don't see none.
So, our next presentation will be started. It's 2.30. So, 3 o'clock we will start. Thank you.