Geospatial information in VIVO - thoughts, ideas, suggestions

Michael Conlon, Christian Hauschke, Violeta Ilik, Anna Kasprzik, Brian J Lowe, Daniel Nüst, Philip Strömert, Melanie Wacker, Tatiana Walther

Keywords: geospatial information, metadata enrichment, findability, interoperability

TL;DR: We outline some known use cases of use cases for geospatial information (GI) in VIVO and provide suggestions for GI dataset

Abstract:

The actors and objects of research and their research activities often cannot be described without their associated locality. Geospatial information (GI) is therefore an essential component of research information, for example in the form of the address of a university, a conference venue, the coordinates of an excavation site or a measuring station, or the area of a forest observed via satellite. To make research information useful, it must be interoperable. Therefore, it makes sense to work with standardised data sets of GI.

In this presentation we outline some known use cases of GI in VIVO. Then we will highlight some critical questions that need to be answered before a widely-used GI dataset can even be created. This includes the challenge of finding a supranational response to the classification of disputed areas, but also issues of openness (licensing), data quality and timelines, and usability of data collection. The presented thoughts will show the path to the creation of an open GI dataset to improve discovery of research information.