BUILDING INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION FOR GEOINFORMATICS

It has become widely recognized that Geoinformatics (GI) is becoming the platform for a new paradigm in how we conduct our research. Whereas GI is growing, we have not yet achieved a truly international, collaborative, sustained system that delivers on the overall promise of GI. There are several reasons for this that apply both nationally and internationally: 1) uneven development of GI across the geoscience disciplines, 2) lack of a consistent and committed funding mechanisms for GI systems, 3) continued minimal interaction between federal/state, government-based GI efforts and those of academia, 4) inconsistent interaction and cooperation among the various GI databases, and 5) a range of technical issues that can broadly be grouped under "interoperability." Progress on the globalization of Geoinformatics is specifically impeded by the lack of organizational structures and funding mechanisms that encourage and support international collaboration. This talk is intended to stimulate discussion among the GI stakeholders, primarily among providers of data systems as the backbone of GI, to alert funding agencies to the opportunities to support collaborative community efforts, and finally, to underscore the need for an international organization that can help facilitate such collaboration. Geoinformatics has matured to the point where such international collaboration is possible, but to accomplish that goal, the various stakeholders must: 1) conceive more effective ways to interact and interoperate, 2) agree on a common framework for GI, that defines and recommends not only technical standards (e.g. metadata, interface protocols, etc.), but also shared goals, best practices, and community approaches, e.g. regarding open data access, data citation, and the assessment of user needs, 3) figure out how to mutually support the continuous maintenance, update and expansion of their various systems, 4) construct a mechanism to support those efforts that want to go into a quasi-static mode or to migrate their system to another site for long-term management, and 5) make a more concerted and collective effort to educate the geoscience user community about the power and value of GI.