GEO Task ST-09-02: Promoting Awareness and Benefits of GEO

Report on Discussions at STC-16
Sydney, April 14-15, 2011

The ST-09-02 report presented at the STC-16 meeting is available as pdf. The report was well received by the STC. The following comments were made:

• Activity 2.1 (Roadmap Activity 2a; a GEOSS citation standard): The STC acknowledge receipt of the draft GEOSS Citation standard. In a brief discussion, it was pointed out that the draft would better be denoted as guidelines and not as standard. In general, the meeting participants saw value for GEOSS to have Citation guidelines or a standard. It was accepted that this V1.0 document did not address a number of issues such as object identification, quality information, and attribution. The STC asks ST-09-02 to work with EGIDA to prepare a V2.0 of the GEOSS Citation Standard, which should address as many as possible of the open issues.
• Activity 2.2 (Roadmap Activity 2b; establishing a "GEO label"): The STC in genaral sees value in having a document that describes the background for and experience with labeling for a wide range of values. Concerns were voiced with respect to sufficient coordination of the activities relevant to the GEO label, including EGIDA, GEOVIQUA, and several GEO Tasks working on quality assurance. ST-09-02 was asked to ensure sufficient coordination between these activities. Joern Hoffmann expressed his concerns that the current development was leading away from the promising draft of a GEO label concept presented to the STC at STC-15 and requested that ST-09-02 continue to develop this concept independent of all the other new activities. However, the majority of the STC-16 participants agreed that is was desirable to coordinate with these groups and to avoid multiple competing proposal for a GEO label. It was agreed to discuss the GEO label document at the next STC meeting. This requires that the GEO label document is made available to the STC in Summer 2011.
• Activity 3.2 (Support outreach of GEO Principals, Committee members and other delegates): There was consensus that the slide library should be developed.
• Activity 3.3 (Roadmap Activity 2d; showing GEOSS at work: compelling examples): There were generally positive comments on the GEOSS Portfolio.
• Activity 4.3 (Transition from research to operational): The STC co-chairs clarified that the STC is not in a position to promote within the frame of GEO observational infrastructure for a transition from research to operational. They requested ST-09-02 to promote suitable candidate infrastructure. The ST-09-02 Point of Contact pointed out that ST-09-02 has no channel into the GEO Plenary, where such promotion could be most effective and there would not be able to do much of a promotion.
• Activity 5.1 (Identify major scientific conference and facilitate plenary presentations on GEO and GEOSS): The initial S+T meeting web page set up by ST-09-02 for the coordination and documentation of GEOSS-related sessions and side event was positively received. The STC supports the idea to develop the web page into an interactive tool.