Survey report - Initiatives for Providing Data and Tools for Research and Education (2020)

The objective of the survey was to study existing initiatives in terms of practices and projects at EuroSDR organizations to provide data and tools to pupils, students, teachers, and scientists for research and/or education purposes.
Keywords:
education, geoportal, tool, open data, data usability, data quality management, NMCA

Geographical data and analysis are a key asset in different domains of education, from primary school to high education and life-long learning, and of research like geography, history, urbanism or environmental science, among others. Engaging with these user communities is part of the mission of many EuroSDR members. It is also a precious investment to improve data value and reusability. Firstly, the education community can give relevant feedback on the data usability from their pedagogical perspectives, scientific users can comment on quality documentation as they need to adopt a critical perspective on results obtained with data and students learn to use such complex data before they go into the work force where they may promote their usage. Second, all these users can help data providers investigate the design of new products to answer emerging needs.

Three commission chairs of EuroSDR (Commission 4 Information usage, Commission 5 Business models and operations and Commission 6 Knowledge transfer) launched a survey on the provision of data and tools for research and education purposes on 13th May 2019. The objective of the survey was to study existing initiatives in terms of practices and projects at EuroSDR organizations to provide data and tools to pupils, students, teachers, and scientists for research and/or education purposes.

A questionnaire was sent to all the delegates of EuroSDR who represent national mapping and cadastral agencies (NMCAs). The respondents were asked to describe their potential initiatives by using a standardized template format, which is in the Annexe 1 of this report. The respondents could describe as many initiatives as relevant for the provision of their data and tools. The deadline was set for 1st July 2019. The answers were compiled and reported in a first draft. As the answer rate was rather low, the draft report was circulated in Spring 2020 again. The first section of this report presents an overview of the results obtained from this survey and the next section presents them more in details using the same structure as the questions of the template.