E-ARK Consortium
The workshop was held in Brussels on Tuesday, 28th of May, with around 50 people participating, both onsite and online. The two-hour event was focused on presenting the latest solutions, implementation experiences and modern research in the field of geospatial records preservation. Presenters also discussed the current issues, challenges and importance of the long-term preservation and accessibility of digital geospatial records.
The workshop was opened by Fulgencio Sanmartín, policy officer at the European Commission’s DG CNECT, who in his opening speech, stressed the importance of eArchiving in the DIGITAL Europe programme. He also highlighted the role of geospatial records and the important links with 3D Digital Cultural Heritage. In the end, he also commented that more training resources are needed in this field.
In the first talk, members of the eArchiving Consortium team presented what is new in the latest eArchiving Content Information Type Specification (CITS) for digital geospatial records. Gregor Završnik from Geoarh.si showed that there were no major changes in the core specification, due to its generic design that promotes adoption. However, new content was introduced in the guidelines for implementing the specification. The guidelines now also show examples of how organisations can use the CITS folder structure to store linked-data elements and point to the use of unique persistent identifiers. In the second part of the talk, Anita Graser from the Austrian Institute of Technology presented the new documentation publication process, and how users can better contribute their views and content through GitHub.
The second talk was presented by Ivars Bergmanis and Sanita Krumina from the Latvian Geospatial Information Agency (LGIA). They presented their experiences and the extent of the Geospatial Heritage digitisation project. The project included digitisation of the LGIA geospatial information fonds including Remote sensing fonds such as aerial photography materials and Historical geospatial material fonds from all disciplines and the periods from 1900 to the present. The project is ongoing and is planned to finish in 2030. Access to digital geospatial materials will boost economic activity, as it will shorten the time to make decisions.
The third talk was also presented by a member of the Geospatial community, Markus Jobst from the Austrian Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying. His talk was oriented on perspectives on future requirements in terms of Service-Oriented Architecture and AI. The key message was, that today’s value of geospatial records comes from its interconnectedness and should be available as such even after it is archived. Another aspect that we need to preserve is the discoverability of the data through the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) codes that every object gets. In conclusion, he stated, that there is a great need for long-term strategies for the preservation of current technology such as SOA and Geospatial Knowledge infrastructures.
The last talk was made by Marjan Ceh, from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He presented the research that is considering an Universal Ontology of Geographic Space (UOGS) as a tool to interpret and reuse geospatial records for both humans and machines. In a world where AI tools such as Chat GPT create great value, there is a need for a persistent way to store knowledge and organise records, so that those AI systems produce more accurate results. And an Ontology is one of the answers to this problem of semantic infrastructure. After a short introduction to the semantic concepts, he proposed the use of UOGS as a semantic reference system, through which we could compare different geospatial records management systems through time and among each other. This could also help with the harmonisation of different geospatial information databases that will eventually be archived in one national archive as well as across different national archives in the EU.
Published presentations of the event are now available and recordings will be released in the coming weeks.