Advancing open geodata practices in research communities

The project aims to improve openness and interaction between research communities working with geospatial data. There is currently a significant gap in the absence of an application that enables research communities and Open Science stakeholders to publish, visualise, combine and extract research geospatial data in the formats desired by users, and to use them directly and openly in teaching and research. The project will focus on addressing key questions and working with research communities to better understand the needs and requirements of researchers for working with geospatial data in an open research data context. Key questions include the desired practices, data formats and standards for searching, combining, sharing and publishing open research geodata, and assessing the capabilities of existing geoportals such as GeoVITe to implement the developed ORD practices. Collaboration with the community, in particular with representatives of the geosciences, is essential to discuss and develop user-centred ORD practices. Participatory approaches aim to focus on user needs to make research geodata findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable in line with the FAIR principles. Based on the identified needs and processes, initial testing and technical implementation will be carried out on the portal. The long-term goal is to establish sustainable tools for the open research geodata community, based on existing open standards and an improved web-based geoportal.