[OSGeo-Discuss] possible idea for a funding opp?

[James Reid]

All, in the UK one of the educational funding charities is having an 
open door ideas pitch where you can pitch ideas relating to research data:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/get-involved/research-data-spring

I'm on the cusp of submitting an idea to this but thought Id poll this 
list first to see if there's any support/ interest i.e. to validate the 
notion and make sure its not just my creeping insanity knocking!
As the submitted ideas will be ranked based on votes cast I was also 
trying to gauge if there would be any support for what I'm proposing.

Below is the nub of the idea. If folks think this is something that has 
merit (and moreover something they might vote for) then could you ping 
me a '+1' off list?

Of course other ideas are also to be encouraged...

cheers
james


Proposal Idea:

The concept of Cloud Work Bench (CWB) is quite simple – to provide 
researchers in the geospatial domain (GI Scientists,geomaticians, GIS 
experts, spatial disciplines) the tools, storage and data persistence 
they require to conduct research without the need to manage the same in 
a local context that can be fraught with socio-technical barriers that 
impede the actual research. By streamlining the availability and 
deployment of open source software tools, by supporting auto-generated 
web services and using open data, the work bench concept is geared 
towards removing the barriers that are inherent in geospatial research 
workflows – how to deploy the tools you want and have the storage and 
data management capabilities without the overhead of doing it all 
yourself. Think of it as an academic Dropbox with additional geospatial 
software tools and data thrown in...


Recognising the high set-up cost for researchers in acquiring and 
managing both the tools and the data with which to undertake research, 
CWB will on demand, instantiate virtual machines that can be configured 
at initiation by the researcher and will pre-populate their custom 
'workbench' with a selection of open source tooling and open data with 
the additional assurance of resilience and persistence provided by a 
University backed private cloud.



We propose piloting the CWB approach within the geospatial research 
community which has a well established and broad user base across 
academia and industry and also has a mature open source toolset and data 
stack which are prerequisites to conducting research e.g. Open Street 
Map, Ordnance Survey Open data, Postgis, Geoserver, GDAL/OGR.


-- 
James S Reid
Geoservices,
EDINA,University of Edinburgh

t:+44 (0)131 651 1383
m:0759 5116988

"The things that pass for knowledge
I can't understand"

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