JISC

The overarching purpose of GECO is to foster a community(ies) of users of geospatial resources (data, services, support). Geospatial, taken in its broadest sense underpins a vast array of academic endeavour – geography represents a fundamental organising axis for information. Space (and time) are fundamental aspects of most resources and activities and the purpose of GECO is to help:

• foster self-help within identifiable communities of interest that emerge form the recent JISC 15/10 funding call (in the Call itself this is referred to as ‘Community Synthesis’;
• increase the use of geospatial tools, infrastructure (data and services) and information for the wider benefit of the teaching, learning and research communities;
• to collate exemplars of use and to establish a trajectory for the future embedding of geospatial resources within research, teaching and learning landscapes;
• to identify and promote best practice (such as standards, interoperability, machine interfaces) and to provide a means for knowledge transfer from specialist to less spatially literate users and domains;
• assist with the maturation of the UK academic Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and ensure that location (space/geography) is championed across sectoral domains.
• Promote the JISC Geospatial Working Group’s (GWG) Vision for geospatial resources in UK higher and further education.
• Champion awareness raising of INSPIRE (summary 2 pager here), ensuring that the sector is cognisant of the obligations and opportunities that this gives rise to.
• Promote good data management principles, including data curation and stewardship ensuring transparency and reuse where practicable.

At the conclusion of the project we anticipate:

1. The establishment of a nexus of (largely) self-sustaining communities that exploit geospatial information within a particular domain.
2. Greater awareness of existing JISC investment in geospatial resources and a higher degree of awareness of key policy areas such as INSPIRE.
3. Additional services and data with exemplar usage and best practice guidance.

Project blog