Geodata & Education

[Markus Neteler]

Dear all,

I would like to suggest some collaboration between Education&Curriculum
(which I hope to render into a committee tomorrow) and the new
Geodata Committee, in particular the "Geodata Packaging Working Group":
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Packaging_Working_Group

Their/our mission is to do "Packaging / Quality Control / Metadata
Augmentation / Documentation".

Since teaching GIS is always related to having data, I would like to encourage
a collaboration on the creation of educational/training data sets. In the GRASS
world the "Spearfish, SD, USA" dataset is well known but a bit dated and
also somewhat limited.

Given the number of interested people, I hope that we manage to generate/collect
in the near future one or many interesting datasets along with documentation
which can be used for teaching. Apparently data should be from the same
region for each dataset. The Education&Curriculum could then work on and
generate exercises or at least idea collections how to use these data packages
with the OSGeo software stack.

In a better world only? Well, I think that we got the critical mass of people
to address this issue. Here in Europe it would be cool to teach GIS with
free European data one day... hopefully soon!

best regards

 Markus