Events & Activities

On July 1-2, 2020 we participated in a virtual expo organized by the NSF Convergence Accelerator (CA) program that provided an opportunity for all of the FY 2019 Convergence Accelerator projects to share information about their projects with the public. Each project had a virtual booth at the Expo. The public had the opportunity to visit each booth; see 5-minute videos about the project; and interact with project team members.

One of the objectives of the expo was to generate expressions of interest from partners who might be willing to provide resources (either financial or in kind) to one or more of the projects for a Phase 2 effort. We received 13 expressions of interest from a variety of individuals and organizations.

In March 2020 we held a virtual workshop that was open to the public. The discussion generated covered a range of topics, which we grouped into technology-centered versus human-centered:

Functional/technology aspects

• Interoperability with other platforms at various levels is key (semantic, ontological, computational, IO and processing)

• How could these tools/methods be expanded to other domains?

• How could the system deal with questions beyond existing knowledge base?

Human-centered aspects

• How to scale up participation? How do efforts like Wikipedia and Open Street map managed and what other models exist? Citizen science efforts another model.

• Different user groups have different questions/timelines/training needs; SDS-OKN more likely to succeed if built in a way to accommodate these

General materials from the workshop are available here:

1. SDS-OKN main session slide deck

2. SDS-OKN main session notes

The workshop was organized into the 5 sections below:

1. Overview of the Phase 1 Project (video)

2. Presentation of Technology Prototypes (video)

3. Break Away Discussion Groups

   • Water Quality (WQ Discussion Notes)

   • Wildland Fire (WF Discussion Notes)

   • Biodiversity Conservation (BC Discussion Notes)

   • GIS&T Body of Knowledge (BoK Discussion Notes)

   • SDS OKN Cloud-Platforms (CP Discussion Notes)

4. Breakout Group Reports (video)

5. Synthesis and Discussion (video)

In February 2020 we held a webinar with collaborators from our different case studies (wildfire, water quality, biodiversity). Attendees were enthusiastic about the potential of geo-semantic technologies to help with their information gathering and analysis. At the end, a number of questions more on the social side came up:

• Can such technologies help change our management paradigms?

• How can these technologies and techniques help us understand and navigate the complex array of people and institutions involved in these convergent decisions?

• How do we handle issues of data/information ownership when trying to create an "open network"?

• How can we find funding to continue such efforts but keep the tools publicly accessible?

A pdf of the slide deck is available here:

SDS-OKN Collaborators Webinar 2020-02-13