DigitalEarth

From RCC 2007

[DigitalEarth] is a conference taking place this June at the UC Berkeley Campus.

Here are some choice words about Digital Earth:

The International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) is a non-political, non-governmental and not-for- profit international organization, principally for promotion of academic exchange, science and technology innovation, education, and international collaboration. The primary purpose of the Society is to promote international cooperation on the Digital Earth vision, and enable the Digital Earth technology to play key roles inter alia, in economic and social sustainable development, environmental protection, disaster mitigation, natural resources conservation and improvement of human beings’ living standard.

-- Dr. Foresman continued by suggesting that the citizens of the world were undergoing a transition in terms of self-educating themselves about the environment in which they live, and that 3-D geobrowsers could enhance this data and information sharing at a fundamental level.

-- The presentation continued with Dr. Goodchild mentioning the International Conference on Discrete Global Grids, the Alexandria Digital Library, and providing some general comments on “geolibraries” – digital catalogs that are searchable by geographic parameters. He noted the value of these emerging geolibraries as a major data discovery tool that permits users to avoid the complexities associated with map projections and similar data conversion issues. -- Professor Faust provided an excellent summary of the rationale for including the current matrix elements and making clear that additions and edits are potentially required and are welcomed. A brief discussion regarding the distinction between viewing the data and actually accessing the data ensued. A comment was made to suggest that data access might be a demand driven issue, not a supply side issue (i.e., data holders will finally relinquish the resources if demand is high enough – as driven by applications).

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What Tools?

How to best get the technical specialists to work together more effectively? How also to enlarge the scope of participants? Wikis can be part of this process..

Ward: I can imagine a process where you send participants an email, saying you have to log in to make a page, and the participants won't do it. "Log in, I dont have time to do that... I don't want to do any more work", etc.

Part of the answer is social engineering. There is no guarantee that busy specialists will get it, or that they will take the time to learn any editing skills.

Ward: Do you want pretty formatting around the edges, or in the content? Ward: Perhaps complex formatting is an impediment to collaboration. What if people try to paste in their custom word doc content, and it fails miserably. They get mad and walk away? But if its badly simple, and they understand how it works, they may put up with the very simple and make the best of it.

Good points. I am of the school that typography is worth the effort, but clearly, overly complex solutions, or mismatched expectations (like Word doc columns failing, or a custom set of tags that are then incompatible with other custom sets of tags) do produce impediments to collaboration.

What are the mechanics of adding links? Square Brackets or not!!

Ward: in general, simple is better. I think double square brackets was a mistake. But perhaps learning MediaWiki formatting would be good for them. It might encourage some Wikipedia participation.

So what are some possible solutions?