Bridging the Gap: IASON Workshop (MED) & Caravan Events, Rabat, Morocco January 29-31 January 2014:

The objective of IASON events

The IASON project launced the first of a series of events of custom tailored seminars and workshops with the main activity of fostering international collaboration of researchers by launching tailor made 2 days workshops under the CARAVAN concept that was introduced by the ISPRS and the OBSERVE FP7-ENV project . Activities will concentrate in providing capacity building informational and interactive seminars in the following thematic nodes.

Node 1 - EO applications in Coastal Monitoring
Node 2 - EO applications in water and soil resources management
Node 3 - EO applications in Mining and Mineral exploration

In total 2 workshops are foreseen, one for every region of interest (Mediterranean & Black Sea) that will include 3 separate sessions, one for every thematic node. Both IASON partners and international experts will be invited speakers, The produced material will be freely available through the IASON website following the experience deployed within the framework of OBSERVE project.

Through this task, IASON project will attempt to capture the need to bring the scientific communities and programmes closer to each other with regard to the three specific challenges

IASON Workshop MED Day 01: Conference on Policy interactions, Research outputs and Capacity Building in Earth Observation and Environmental Applications

The workshop was hosted by the Centre Regional Africain des Sciences et Technologie de l' Espace en Langue Francaise, affilié à l'ONU and was held together with the regular meetings of IASON & EOPOWER projects in Rabat, Morocco January 29-31 January 2014. The workshop had a twofold objective targeting traditional users and local policy/decision makers.

The first part was devoted in promoting integration of national administration into existing R&I results. It was targeted to policy makers, researchers, and stakeholders from the region along with European and International experts anf help local stakeholders to be informed in the current European needs and trends in EO in the thematic nodes.

The second part was devoted to capacity building along the thematic nodes through the use of standardized interfaces. The "Bringing GEOSS services into Practice" hands-on workshop will teach attendees how to set up their own SDI and how to publish and share data and metadata through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). The training explained and teached the participants how to set up their own SDI and access by their laptops the high performance computation infrastructures in order to process remotely large geospatial data. The resources of the enviroGRIDS system are accessible to the large community of users through the BSC-OS Portal that provides Web applications for data management, hydrological model calibration and execution, satellite image processing, report generation and visualization, citizen oriented applications, and virtual training center. The portal publishes through Internet both the geospatial functionality provided by Web technologies, and high performance computation resources.

The training session emplified three Web applications available through the BSC-OS Portal:

GreenLand application, flexible description and processing of satellite images for land cover classification (e.g. vegetation areas).

gSWAT application, calibration and execution of the SWAT hydrological model over the Grid and HPC infrastructure.

eGLE platform, developing Earth Science oriented e-learning materials

Through this workshop, IASON project informed the need to bring the scientific communities and programs closer to each other with regard to the three specific thematic nodes. Knowledge gained in the workshop will help to better cope with the regional needs for EO applications not only in the three thematic nodes but also in a broader area so that all GEO Societal Benefit Areas will be addressed. International experts and IASON project members gave plenary talks, while the produced material will be freely available through the IASON website.

Hands-on Workshop "Bringing GEOSS Services into practice

The "Bringing GEOSS services into practice" course aimed at teaching participants how to install, configure and deploy a set of open source software to publish and share data and metadata through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) using OGC web services & ISO standards.

GEOSS has been created as an international voluntary effort that connects geospatial and Earth Observation and information infrastructures, acting as a gateway between producers of environmental data and end users. The aim of GEOSS is to enhance the relevance of Earth observations and to offer public access to comprehensive, near-real time data, information and analyses of the environment.

Participants installed the free software Virtual Box on their laptop before the workshop (www.virtualbox.org). This allowed use a virtual machine with all GIS software, data and tutorial. This virtual machine is given to participants during the workshop.

The workshop evolved in 2 sessions.
Session 1:

• Introduction: Concepts on Spatial Data Infrastructures
• How to store geospatial data? - PostGIS and flat rasters
• How to publish geospatial data? - GeoServer; Web services (WMS, WFS, WCS), KML, SLD
• How to document and search geospatial data? - GeoNetwork, CSW, ISO metadata
• How to process geospatial data? - PyWPS, WPS

Session 2:

• How to view geospatial data? WMS, OpenLayers (web), QGIS (GIS and cartography), Google Earth (KML)
• How to download geospatial data? - WFS, WCS, QGIS (editing geometry and attributes)
• How to analyze geospatial data? - Consuming a local/remote WPS from QGIS
• How to share geospatial data? - Registration in GEOSS, Geo Discovery and Access Broker

Conference Workshop Results & Conclusions

IASON workshop organized in Rabat in end of January 2014 was a success with an important participation of experts from 22 countries, including IASON project partners, experts of North Africa and researchers in sub-Saharan Africa. In total 116 participants attended the conference on Policy Interaction and Research outputs in Capacity Building open to the General Public including Policy Makers, Researchers and End Users with 42 participants attending the two training workshops.

After the success of this event, CRASTE-LF and its partners, the ISESCO* (Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the Ministry of High Education and Scientific Research of Government of Ivory Coast and in interaction with the European project EOPOWER decided to organize a conference similar to that held in Rabat to benefit of experts from the region of West Africa in Abidjan in early March 2014.

IASON project meeting in RABAT

The 29th of January IASON project organized the 3rd consortium meeting prior to the start of the conference and workshops. During the meeting the coordinator Prof. Patias presented progress in deliverables and confirmed that all activities are according to the initial work plan. All work package leaders analysed in details the specific activities to be implemented in every task and proposed an updated dissemination plan including synergies with EO-POWER and other relevant FP7-ENV projects.

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