[OSGeo-Edu] Some thoughts on the production of educational material about FOSS Geospatial Tools

[Simon Cropper]

Massimilino,

I have looked at http://en.wikibooks.org. It is not bad but essentially still just a repository. Considering the speed that FOSS GIS update and the need to create updated editions of tutorials every 6-12 months for multiple packages, it is imperative at this stage that any on-line solution provides a rapid means of creating derivatives. Otherwise why do we care how people store their data (except maybe for distribution purposes).

If you look at WikiBooks most are articles that have relatively static content and surprisingly few images. If you go to the edit page the text is inter-dispersed with markup, if you export to PDF you can disassemble the file from scratch, or if you view the page's source with the browser you can do the same thing.

What is becoming apparent is that it does not matter how a document is stored, you still need to break it into parts, edit and then reconstruct it every time you need to upgrade a tutorial. Identifying a tool that supports this process and what format it imports and exports data would be good.

Anyone know of a program that can strip a PDF or OpenOffice file of its content leaving only the document structure, allow the parts to updated (or takes through this process in an orderly manner) then reconstruct the file? A big ask, but essentially what we need.

Simon Cropper

(C) Simon Cropper 2010. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia