[OSGeo-Announce] OSGeo and TIB Sign a Memorandum of Understanding Recognizing the Significance of Open Geospatial as part of the Record of Science

[Jorge Sanz]

OSGeo and TIB Sign a Memorandum of Understanding Recognizing the
Significance of Open Geospatial as part of the Record of Science

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the German National
Library of Science and Technology (TIB) have signed a Memorandum of
Understanding (MoU) on March 23, 2018. The aim of the agreement is to
foster access, sharing and discoverability of geo-information, including
software, data, conference abstracts, and conference video recordings.

The memorandum is the result of previous collaborations since 2014,
regarding the preservation of open geospatial as part of the record of
science: since 2006, OSGeo hosts a range of annual open geospatial
conferences at the regional, national, and global levels, commonly referred
to as Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G). Conference
video recordings from these FOSS4G conferences have become a valuable
source for state-of-the-art geo-information which are used in research,
industry and education. FOSS4G conference videos, and other video content
related to the OSGeo software communities require easy access, long term
preservation and reliable scientific citation.

TIB recognizes the FOSS4G conference recordings as significant scientific
content, by including these as indexed records in the TIB Video Portal
“AV-Portal”, a web-based platform for quality-tested scientific videos.

The TIB AV-Portal already contains all available video recordings from past
FOSS4G conferences on the global scale, plus regional conferences for
North-America, and the German speaking nations Austria, Germany and
Switzerland. Historical recordings from earlier open geospatial events are
also available in the AV-Portal dating back until 2001.

OSGeo volunteers and TIB staff collaborate closely to ensure that new
conference videos from recently held conferences will be available in the
TIB AV-Portal as soon as possible.

In addition, for the German-speaking FOSSGIS conference series, all
conference abstracts are also collected by TIB.

Based on these well-established working relations, both organisations have
agreed
•       To assist in developing an open archive for discovery of FOSS4G
event materials
•       To preserve past scientific documents and materials as part of
OSGeo foundation projects
•       To work closely with existing initiatives such as GeoForAll,
OSGeo’s education arm, to help archive necessary geospatial research
•       To enhance the discoverability of OSGeo-related content by
performing ongoing research and development activities (including automated
metadata enrichment, linked open data, and ontology-based approaches)

About TIB
The TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology is the
German National Library of Science and Technology and a member of the
Leibniz Association. It is jointly funded by the Federal Ministry of
Education and Research (BMBF) and the 16 German states. As a research
library, it conducts applied research and development in order to generate
new services and optimise existing ones. Its key areas of research are in
the fields of Data Science & Digital Libraries, Non-Textual Material, Open
Knowledge, Open Science and Visual Analytics. With a collection of over 9
million items in 2017, the TIB is the largest library for science and
technology in the world. TIB’s AV-Portal allows to search for and access
  scientific videos from the fields of science and technology and hosts
OSGeo conference recordings (FOSS4G, FOSSGIS etc.) and other OSGeo video
material.

About OSGeo
OSGeo (https://www.osgeo.org/) is a not-for-profit organization founded in
2006 whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development
of open source geospatial technologies and data. The Foundation provides
financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source
geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to
which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources,
secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for
public benefit. In 2018 OSGeo is the home for over 30 geospatial open
source projects, and the OSGeo foundation has over 30,000 members. Since
2006 OSGeo has also hosted the widely popular international FOSS4G (Free
and Open Source Software for Geospatial) conference, rotating it all over
the globe each year.
Read more about partnerships with OSGeo:
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_OSGeo_All