[OSGeodata] Tie-in to Education Committee

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

On Tue, Apr 18, 2006 at 10:48:01PM -0700, Tyler Mitchell wrote:
> want to teach OSGeo material.  For most of us who want to demonstrate 
> functionality of a product, there is little benefit in spending time to pull 
> together customised tutorial datasets.
> 
> > I wouldn't be surprised if we put together some dataset descriptions (I
> > can't think of a single "ideal" data set) that we would find many already
> > exist and can be freely used. Those that don't exist can be assembled
> > easily. Would it make sense to create a wish list of assorted tutorial
> > datasets? If I could better understand what people want I think I'd better
> > understand the problem and might have some ideas.
> 
> I'm not trying to find a single ideal data set, but a few that are simply good 
> enough for demonstrating software capabilities.  For example, a lo-res global 
> raster and country boundaries would be fine for showing off the features of a 
> WMS and a WFS.  Add in some more political boundaries or transportation data 
> and we'd have a very simple, yet useful, package.  It could then also serve 
> well as an input dataset for desktop applications to show how to do 
> colour-theming, simple analysis, etc.

http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Discovery_Working_Group#Public_Datasets_for_Possible_Mirroring_or_Distribution
is a long list of public domain data that was written over a couple of
irc meetings. This was written as a 'these are data sets that OSGeo
could usefully host WMS/WFS services for' list.
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Repository contains some
post-meeting notes. BlueMarbleNG, SRTM and VMap0 are a baseline for
this.

One question that's definitely come up is what happens when teaching
or working in an environment of scarce bandwidth - it won't always be
possible or desirable to use online services - people will want
downloadable / 'compiled' geodata packages. 

While this whole 'sketching out needs and desires' phase is going on,
I'd be interested to hear what kind of 'dynamic repackaging' of
geodata, people might be interested in for educational purposes. I
imagine something a bit like seamless.gov, but giving you more
flexibility over the format - "i'd like this, this and this data
sources covering this area, in shapefile + geotiff formats, with an
optional configuration file for $OSGeo_application". 

I think 'use case' rather than 'wish list', but that doesn't stop me
wanting to get carried away, either...  ;)

https://geodata.osgeo.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=geodata&msgNo=37 
- a longer ramble about data packaging, working groups and a lot of
intersecting goals in this area. Geodata has an IRC meeting at 11EST /
16UTC tomorrow, at which I hope we can discuss data packaging desires
and how this can best support the Edu group's activities, and everyone
here would be welcome there. 

cheers,

jo