Author Archives: codata_blog

May 2019: Publications in the Data Science Journal

May 2019: Publications in the Data Science Journal

Title: Interdisciplinary Comparison of Scientific Impact of Publications Using the Citation-Ratio
Author: Arthur R. Bos, Sandrine Nitza
URL: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-019

Title: Diversity of Woody Species in Djamde Wildlife Reserve, Northern Togo, West Africa
Author:Tchagou Awitazi, Raoufou Radji, Kotchikpa Okoumassou
URL: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-018

Title: A Generic Research Data Infrastructure for Long Tail Research Data Management
Author: Atif Latif, Fidan Limani, Klaus Tochtermann
URL: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-017

Title: Time Series Prediction Model of Grey Wolf Optimized Echo State Network
Author: Huiqing Wang, Yingying Bai, Chun Li, Zhirong Guo, Jianhui Zhang
URL: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-016

Title: Fostering Data Sharing in Multidisciplinary Research Communities: A Case Study in the Geospatial Domain
Author: Martina Zilioli, Simone Lanucara, Alessandro Oggioni, Cristiano Fugazza, Paola Carrara
URL: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-015

Urban Data Science School from May 13 – May 23, 2019

This article was first published by instructors Dr. Shaily R. Gandhi and Felix Emeka Anyiam https://shailygandhi.github.io/UrbanDataScience2019/ – Shaily and Felix are both alumni of the CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science.

The second summer school on Urban Data Science was conducted following the successful completion of the first summer school on Urban Data Science in 2018 which is an outcome of the collaboration which took place at The CODATA-RDA Research Data Science Summer School in Trieste, Italy 2017. This year the course Urban Data Science was hosted by the Summer Winter School CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India from May 13 – May 23, 2019.

With the upcoming trend of data driven solutions for use at the central level for making city operations more efficient and effective; the next generation of city planners will need to be as comfortable using advanced simulation algorithms as it is with design. This course helped to address the challenges with poor use of available open data in decision making while keeping urban in focus. This summer school course had been modified to get students started with the basic data science components in a short span of 10 days. This year the course had an additional 4 days which helped in making more insightful results from the open data sets that the last years 6 days course. Open data sets allows for a deeper understanding of the urban dynamics and its associated challenges, allowing the students to have a firmer control over possible bias and therefore analysing and giving solutions for overcoming these observed challenges.

The course this year was carefully modified with the feedback of students from the previous summer school of 2018, keeping in mind that the 24 new intakes are from different backgrounds like planning, architects, civil engineer, geomatics and other disciplines from both bachelors and masters level who belonged to IT and non- IT backgrounds. The curriculum covered basics of Git and Git hub, where students got an extremely intense hand on practical experience in using the software and learning how to open up their projects on GitHub. More over Open Refine, R and excel was covered for data cleaning. The lessons of the basics of R were prepared by using the material of software carpentry lessons Programming with R, R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis and Geospatial Data workshop. The concepts were taken from various sources and the lessons were redesigned focusing on urban problems and analysis.

The school begun with students understanding the concepts behind setting-up their study objectives towards enhanced conceptualized Research titles and using techniques to develop a research theory, planning the area of their study, thus bearing in mind the type of data available from Open data sets to be captured, whether continuous, discrete, ordinal or nominal data and the different stages of statistical analysis that can be conducted in other to produce the expected outcomes. Knowledge on research methodologies and implementation of statistical application software’s to support data analysis was one of the vital goals of the course. The Statistical software package called “R” was used as it has become a very powerful and useful tool for the purpose of data cleaning, management, statistical analysis and data graphical visualization. When mastered, this application is user friendly and could reduce the time and efforts of the researcher, student and professionals. The word cloud below shows the number of technology students had explored during the summer school.

Urban Data Science Summer School 2019

Innovative teaching techniques like mixing theory and practical’s with real life examples were followed in this course as it had diverse students attending and it required a special attention to keep the whole class on the same pace. Despite the course being intense from morning 9:30am till evening 5:30pm, it was very motivating to see the students following up with the topics and catching up with the pace of the instructors. To better understand the various levels of the 24 students, we conducted a pre and post summer school survey which gave us an idea about how well the school has changed the perspective of the students for programming in R to being confident in using Git and OpenRefine. Daily feedback was taken from the students similar to the last years practice to enhance class activity decisions by tutors. Continuous constructive comments from the students made it more effective as the tutors were able to achieve the desired output by changing the teaching method according to the requirement of the students. This process of understanding the capability of the students was well appreciated and implemented.

Urban Data Science Summer School 2019 was well appreciated by the students and the outcomes of the course were very insightful with statistical evidence. The topics selected by the students and its frequency is shown in the below Word Cloud. Urban planning and decision making consists of insight—and this insights are collected and analysed using open data sets in other to know how things are in our environment today, which this course promoted deeply. The role of Urban Data Science is in enhancing Urban Planning and Policy-making with more data driven decisions which is in need at this time. The students of this summer school came up with wonderful insights and results. It was a great pleasure to receive outputs of the case study in various topics such as: Crime, the Economy, Education, Governance and Planning, Environment, Public Health, Road Accident, Sports, etc.

Urban Data Science Summer School 2019

Linda Reeba Koshy, a student of the summer school’s project was a case study on the Prevalence of Obesity among Socially Vulnerable Groups in the United States, with interesting results proving that Obesity is prevalent among Ethnic/Racial minorities, and that socioeconomic, racial factors influence obesity in children and the elderly. Also, persons from Low income households and lower educational levels were more likely to be obese due to their poor dietary choices. A second study on analyzing the performance of Indian states and union territories in terms of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for the year 2018 by Kavina Mehta recommended from the analysis that Law Enforcement and Policy Interventions should be the first steps towards enhancing Indian’s sustainable development targets along with political willingness. The study on the Understanding of the Pattern of Terrorist Attacks in India by Pooja Toshniwal, concluded that more number of attacks are happening in Jammu and Kashmir using various types of weapons. This analysis of attacks helps in understanding the pattern of attacks which could be used by defence to halt future attacks. Contribution of Education in Development of countries across the world by Surabhi Samant threw more light on some of the un-expecting factors about the literacy rate which is significantly affected by child marriage, child labour, and poverty. There is no significant impact on government expenditure which means it is not about spending money but also the implementation of the right mechanism. This would be contextual to every country and its economic status. The study also concluded that the literacy rate has a significant impact on Human Development and Happiness Index of a country, and moderate impact on Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In principle, education not only encourages economic growth but also assures quality life and overall development of a country. Many more interesting studies were carried out under this course. In conclusion, the inclusion of Urban Data Science in the SWS curriculum is priceless, as it brought an exponential improvement in the scholastic learning of the participants towards their data and spatial analytics enhancement via visualization and performance.

April 2019: Publications in the Data Science Journal

April 2019: Publications in the Data Science Journal

Title: A Survey of Machine Learning Approaches and Techniques for Student Dropout Prediction
Author: Neema Mduma, Khamisi Kalegele, Dina Machuve
URL: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-014

Title: GeoSimMR: A MapReduce Algorithm for Detecting Communities based on Distance and Interest in Social Networks
Author: Zaher Al Aghbari, Mohammed Bahutair, Ibrahim Kamel
URL: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-013

Title: Building an International Consensus on Multi-Disciplinary Metadata Standards: A CODATA Case History in Nanotechnology
Author: John Rumble, John Broome, Simon Hodson
URL: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-012

CODATA is pleased to announce Mark Parsons as the new Editor-in-Chief of the Data Science Journal

In his blog post, Mark writes: ‘I am especially interested in helping DSJ build its niche as an influential journal of the ‘science of data’ in the sense that CODATA described it decades ago. We need more fora that encourage dialog across research and practice to understand all the issues around the socio-technical work necessary for data to be findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable, ethical, secure, etc.’ …

‘I have been a member of the DSJ editorial board since the journal moved to Ubiquity Press, and I have been impressed at how Sarah Callaghan and other editors have worked to increase the journal’s quality. I want to continue this momentum. I want to further bolster the review quality and also raise the possibility of open reviews. The nature of DSJ is that it often attracts submissions and requires reviews from practitioners who have much less of a mandate to publish than researchers. I believe practitioners should be encouraged to contribute (with research as well as practice papers), so we should do what we can to recognize and model excellent contributions in this area. …

‘Thanks to Sarah’s great work, DSJ has a bright future as submissions continue to increase in number and quality. DSJ was ahead of its time when it was founded in the 1990s. I am eager to explore how it can continue to push important conversations forward. I welcome all your ideas. Please tell me what you think. Better yet, tell the community through a submission to DSJ!

Mark replaces Sarah Callaghan, who has served since 2015, when the Data Science Journal was moved to its current platform with Ubiquity Press.

Sarah writes:

‘In my four year tenure, I am very proud of the fact that 135 papers have been published, along with 6 Special Collections with another 5 Special Collections in the pipeline. The journal has grown more popular and is steadily publishing research that is more impactful as time goes on, and this is a testament to the hard work of all involved – including our reviewers and authors.

‘It is time for me to hand over the role of EiC to another, and it is with no small amount of sadness that I do so. Being EiC has been incredibly rewarding (and occasionally infuriating) and I have learned a great deal from it. I am very pleased to know that Mark Parsons is taking over the role, and know that the journal will be in safe, knowledgeable hands.

‘It only remains for me to say my farewells and thank yous. Thank you to the authors, without whom there would be no articles to publish. A thousand thank yous to all my editors, reviewers, colleagues and friends – your efforts on behalf of the journal are deeply, deeply appreciated, as is your wisdom and expertise. I wish you all the very best for the future, and look forward to reading more excellent papers published in the DSJ!’

Growing the Conversation on the Science of Data

Image CC-BY-NC Laura Molloy @LM_HATII from the art intervention series ‘Humans of Data’ http://codata.org/blog/category/humans-of-data/

Mark Parsons joins CODATA as Editor-in-Chief, Data Science Journal

I am honored and excited to take on the role of Editor in Chief for the Data Science Journal.

I have had a bit of history with DSJ. One of my earliest peer-reviewed papers was published with Ruth Duerr in DSJ (Parsons and Duerr 2005). I vividly remember hurrying to make revisions in Costa Rica before heading offline for several weeks. I’d still like to meet one of the reviewers (perhaps I have) who made really helpful comments on how to organize and present the paper to get my points across in a more rigorous and impactful way. I was a data practitioner, not a researcher, and was largely unschooled in formal scientific writing. The guidance was most valuable, and the paper still gets cited now and again.

Years later, I and Peter Fox published what was one one of my most controversial and influential papers (Parsons and Fox 2013). This time, DSJ allowed me to publish after an unconventional public review process involving reams of open review comments from more than two-dozen people.

In short, DSJ has been a catalyst for my career. So I am eager to help foster the journal’s growth and influence and maybe help a few more data scientists along their way.

I am especially interested in helping DSJ build its niche as an influential journal of the ‘science of data’ in the sense that CODATA described it decades ago. We need more fora that encourage dialog across research and practice to understand all the issues around the socio-technical work necessary for data to be findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable, ethical, secure, etc.

I have been a member of the DSJ editorial board since the journal moved to Ubiquity Press, and I have been impressed at how Sarah Callaghan and other editors have worked to increase the journal’s quality. I want to continue this momentum. I want to further bolster the review quality and also raise the possibility of open reviews. The nature of DSJ is that it often attracts submissions and requires reviews from practitioners who have much less of a mandate to publish than researchers. I believe practitioners should be encouraged to contribute (with research as well as practice papers), so we should do what we can to recognize and model excellent contributions in this area.

While improving the content of DSJ, we should also continue to modernize its presentation. We need to actively consider machine-readable papers and content negotiation for both the papers and the metadata. Much like at its founding, DSJ needs to advance the whole concept of scholarly communication.

Thanks to Sarah’s great work, DSJ has a bright future as submissions continue to increase in number and quality. DSJ was ahead of its time when it was founded in the 1990s. I am eager to explore how it can continue to push important conversations forward. I welcome all your ideas. Please tell me what you think. Better yet, tell the community through a submission to DSJ!

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish’: a farewell from outgoing Data Science Journal Editor-in-Chief, Sarah Callaghan

Back in early 2015, I was approached at a coffee break at a conference, and invited to take on the role of Editor-in-Chief of the Data Science Journal. This was a little bit of a surprise, I will confess, as my previous academic journal experience had been as an associate editor, along with some projects working on data citation and data publishing. The opportunity was too good to resist, however, and with the support of my employer CEDA I was very pleased to take on the role.

My tenure as EiC also coincided with the move of the journal to its current platform on Ubiquity Press, and came with it the need to appoint a new editorial board, develop a new scope and guidance, collate a new reviewer database, and the other minutiae of re-launching an academic journal. All these things were achieved with the help of my colleagues in the editorial board and section editors, along with the help and support of the Ubiquity Press staff and the CODATA Executive Committee.

In my four year tenure, I am very proud of the fact that 135 papers have been published, along with 6 Special Collections with another 5 Special Collections in the pipeline. The journal has grown more popular and is steadily publishing research that is more impactful as time goes on [https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=4700152809&tip=sid], and this is a testament to the hard work of all involved – including our reviewers and authors.

It is time for me to hand over the role of EiC to another, and it is with no small amount of sadness that I do so. Being EiC has been incredibly rewarding (and occasionally infuriating) and I have learned a great deal from it. I am very pleased to know that Mark Parsons is taking over the role, and know that the journal will be in safe, knowledgeable hands.

It only remains for me to say my farewells and thank yous. Thank you to the authors, without whom there would be no articles to publish. A thousand thank yous to all my editors, reviewers, colleagues and friends – your efforts on behalf of the journal are deeply, deeply appreciated, as is your wisdom and expertise. I wish you all the very best for the future, and look forward to reading more excellent papers published in the DSJ!

Sarah

The advent of big data heralds huge opportunities

This article was first published by the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology http://www.jkuat.ac.ke/prof-muliaro-the-advent-of-big-data-heralds-huge-opportunities/

Prof. Muliaro delivering his public lecture presentation

The advent and emergence of “Big Data” and its related technologies has brought with it immense opportunities which can be seized if a new era of openness that leverages on various technologies, institutional and organizational frameworks that are critical in harnessing data are developed.

This was revealed during a public lecture titled: Openness in Data, Science and Governance, delivered by Muliaro Wafula, an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing, School of Computing and Information Technology and Director of the ICT Centre of Excellence and Open Data at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT), Monday, April, 15, 2019.

Addressing the audience that included the President of CODATA, Prof. Barend Mons and the Executive Director, Dr. Simon Hudson, Prof. Muliaro gave an exposition on the concept of Open data, Open science, and Open governance.

Prof. Mons makes his brief remarks

Characterizing open science as a combination of concepts, tools, platforms and media to promote creation and dissemination of knowledge in free, open and more inclusive ways Prof Muliaro stated that “the goal of open science is to accelerate scientific progress and discoveries to benefit all, guaranteeing that scientific outputs are publicly available and easily accessible for others to use, re-use, and build upon.

He identified what he termed as key open science challenges namely; lack of established best open science practices, competition among scientists, existing credit systems that favour closed science, non-disclosure agreements and copyright laws and intellectual property guidelines as some of the drawbacks against full realization of open science.

Citing the partnership that brings together Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, JICA AFRICA-ai-JAPAN Project, IBM East Africa, CODATA and the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI), Prof. Muliaro said, the parties were working closely to promote the value of open research data through organizing hackathons on selected datasets of interest to the public in disciplines such as public health and agriculture.

Leveraging on their synergies, the initiative seeks to build, among others, “innovative mobile and web applications that make access and consumption of research data easy for the benefit of the society; encourage scientists to open their research data for public consumption and use, showcase open data capability in providing innovative solutions to societal challenges,” Prof. Muliaro stated.

Prof. Abukutsa delivers the opening remarks

He mentioned Smart Health Application based on indigenous vegetables data, Children Food Nutrition Formula Application based on local Kenyan foods, and Effects of Mugukaa on Health, as some of the key outputs under the initiative.

The Vice Chancellor, Prof. Victoria Wambui Ngumi, in her opening message said, the journey towards embracing open data at JKUAT began five years ago when the institution established the ICT Centre of Excellence and Open Data (iCEOD) – which is expected to serve Kenya and Africa as a region, adding that the Centre had already taken its strategic role seriously, making contributions at the national and global level.

Prof. Ngumi further observed in the remarks read on her behalf by the Deputy Vice Chancellor in charge of Research, Production and Extension, Prof. Mary Abukutsa, that “JKUAT is among few leading universities that have taken a bold step towards creating an enabling environment for open data by formulating and adopting an Open Data Research (JORD) Policy in line with the CODATA – led Nairobi Open Data Principles of 2014.”

She however decried insufficient and poor public sensitization on issues such as open data, open science and open governance, arguing that “the tradition and culture for most people has been to be private by default.” Prof Ngumi called for a deliberate strategy to towards changing that mindset.

A section of the academic community including guests
who attendedthe public lecture presentation.

The President of CODATA, Prof. Barend Mons, said Africa could lead the initiative to use data at the global level noting, “data or knowledge is the new oil or gold and it could be more useful if it is shared,” while CODATA Executive Director, Dr. Simon Hudson, underscored the importance of data in implementing sustainable development goals by “creating and measuring data to make meaningful, mindful informed decisions.”

Present at the public lecture included; Deputy Vice Chancellor (Administration), Prof. Bernard Ikua; Principal, College of Pure and Applied Sciences, Prof. David Mulati; Deans of Schools including the Dean, School of Computing and Information Technology, Prof. Stephen Kimani, Heads of Departments and Faculty and students.

Tracking the impact of the CODATA/RDA data science schools: the case of the OSG

The CODATA-RDA Research Data Science Schools provide Early Career Researchers with the opportunity to meet their colleagues and learn relevant Data Science skills. We actively encourage students to use their learning as an opportunity to create new collaborations and generate new research.

One spectacularly successful example of this is Oscar Arbelaez Echeverry from Colombia who, through links made at the schools, enabled approximately 1.2 million CPU hours [this is akin to having access to a 1600 core cluster for a month] to be run on Monte Carlo simulations. As a result of accessing the Open Science Grid resource, six publications [1-7] have been generated by his supervisor, in the best journals in the field and for wider audiences . By providing Oscar with the relevant skills, he has been instrumental to advancing research in his home institution.

Oscar attended the Trieste school in 2017 (#dataTrieste17). He has a background in Condensed Matter Physics and was working with Juan Alzate-Cardona at the Departamento de Física y Química, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Manizales. Juan is working on computational studies of magnetic materials. This requires extensive Monte Carlo simulations of the materials and is highly computationally intensive, but allows insights into the nature of the materials such as the magnetocaloric effect – which in essence is how the temperature of a magenetic material changes when subjected to a change in the magnetic field around it.

As it was, the research team was highly limited in the work they could do because they didn’t have sufficient access to compute resource and were unaware of freely accessible services like the Open Science Grid (OSG) and how to apply them. During the school Oscar was introduced to the OSG in the Computational Infrastructures course run by Rob Quick. OSG scavenges computing cycles from the vast amount of grid computing clusters available worldwide and offers 1.5 billion CPU hours per year which is free and open to all researchers. Oscar described the problem he was having to Rob and they agreed to make use of the OSG.

Since being a student at the school in 2017, Oscar has gone to act as a helper in the school in São Paulo, Brazil. He is now in Switzerland completing research for his Ph.D. This success story is precisely why we work on these schools – the schools are not just about the materials; they are about building communities and creating connections. These connections are key in enabling these opportunities and successes for researchers in Low and Middle Income Countries.

If you give people access to tools and teach them how to use them, you can transform the research being generated. The CODATA/RDA schools are doing this across the LMIC, one student at a time. Well, 250+ now and counting… Just imagine the ripple effect all these individuals have had in their home communities!

[1] Pordes, R. et al. The open science grid. J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 78, 012057 (2007)

[2] Alzate-Cardona, J. D., Sabogal-Suárez, D., Arbeláez-Echeverri, O. D. & Restrepo-Parra, E. Vegas: Software package for the atomistic simulation of magnetic materials. Rev. Mex. Física 64, 490 (2018).

[3] Alzate-Cardona, J. D., Sabogal-Suárez, D., Evans, R. F. L. & Restrepo-Parra, E. Optimal phase space sampling for Monte Carlo simulations of Heisenberg spin systems. J. Phys. Condens. Matter 31, 095802 (2019).

[4] Alzate-Cardona, J. D., Salcedo-Gallo, J. S., Rodríguez-Patiño, D. F., Acosta-Medina, C. D. & Restrepo-Parra, E. Unveiling a Scaling and Universal Behavior for the Magnetocaloric Effect in Cubic Crystal Structures: A Monte Carlo Simulation. Sci. Rep. 9, 5228 (2019).

[5] Acosta-Medina, C. D., Alzate-Cardona, J. D. & Restrepo-Parra, E. Monte Carlo study of the magnetization reversal times in a core/shell magnetic nanoparticle. Comput. Condens. Matter 17, e00338 (2018).

[6] Sabogal-Suárez, D., Alzate-Cardona, J. D. & Restrepo-Parra, E. Influence of the shape on exchange bias in core/shell nanoparticles. J. Magn. Magn. Mater. 482, 120–124 (2019).

[7] Salcedo-Gallo, J. S., Rodríguez-Patiño, D. F., Alzate-Cardona, J. D., Barco-Ríos, H. & Restrepo-Parra, E. Magnetocaloric effect and magnetic properties in NdMnO3 perovskite: A Monte Carlo approach. Phys. Lett. A 382, 2069–2074 (2018).

Deadline for Applications for the 2019 Foundation School http://www.codata.org/working-groups/research-data-science-summer-schools/datatrieste-2019 and Advanced Workshops http://www.codata.org/working-groups/research-data-science-summer-schools/datatrieste-2019 is approaching: 18 April

This post is a syndicated copy of the one at https://www.rd-alliance.org/blogs/tracking-impact-codatarda-data-science-schools-case-osg.html

Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019

A Hackathon and Ideathon for Sustainable Africa

The IST-Africa 2019 conference, supported by the European Commission (EC) and the African Union Commission (AUC), addresses a series of societal challenges.

The Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is a contribution to the joint efforts to solve these challenges. The hackathon addresses some of the key topics identified by the IST-Africa conference, such as agriculture, environmental sustainability, collaborative open innovation and ICT-enabled entrepreneurship.

The Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is one of the satellite INSPIRE hackathons. The hackathon is organised in the frame of the IST Africa 2019 Conference. The hackathon is a collaborative event organised by Plan4all and Club of Ossiach associations and EU projects including EO4Agri, DataBio, NextGEOSS, EUXDAT, PoliVisu and AFarCloud.

DATES

The hackathon starts in March 2019 by creating hackathon teams. The hackathon will then run remotely until the event held on 10 May 2019 in Nairobi where the hackathon results will be presented within a workshop at IST Africa starting at 9am.

VENUE

The hackathon consists of two parts including:

a virtual period: The teams will work virtually led by the team mentors. Membership and participation in this part is open to all. There will be educational webinars during the virtual hackathon to facilitate the progress/collaboration.
a workshop (attendance optional for team members/participants) which is the closing event of the hackathon where the results of the hackathon will be presented. The workshop will take place in Laico Regency Hotel, Loita Street, Nairobi, which is located in the city centre. For more details, please visit the IST Africa website.

GOAL

The goal of the Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is to build and strengthen relationships between several EU projects and African communities. This hackathon is not a competition. The focus is on building relationships, making rapid developments and collecting ideas for future research and innovation.

TEAMS & MENTORS

The Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 is organised using an unconventional approach, tailored to cater for cross-continental collaboration.

The hackathon starts with a set of predefined projects. Each project has a mentor (see the list of projects and mentors below). The participants of the hackathon can choose to work on any of the predefined projects. In this way, teams will be built to collaborate on the projects.

The mentors will organise the work and are responsible for the communication in the project teams and will act as team leaders.

The projects and their mentors for the Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019 include:

TEAM	PROJECT TITLE & DESCRIPTION	MENTORS
TEAM 1	Food Security in Relation to Earth Observation (GEOSS and COPERNICUS Relevance) Explore the ways how to support agriculture in Africa at regional and local levels using Earth observation data and technologies. The gaol is not to transfer solutions from Europe to Africa. The goal is to find, develop or adapt solutions that will work in Africa.	Karel Charvat
TEAM 2	Climatic Services for Africa When to start sowing or planting, when you need to irrigate fields or intervene in any way and how to increase the yield potential? These and similar question lead to the core of this team which is access and proper use of weather and other climate related data.	Karel Jedlicka
TEAM 3	Open Land Use for Africa (OLU4Africa) The main aim is to explore open available data source that could be used for building OLU4Africa, extend the current database, build metadata and to build a community that will help to manage and improve the data and also to demonstrate the usability of OLU4Africa in practice.	Dmitrij Kozuch
TEAM 4	IoT Technologies for Africa This team will explore available IoT networks, their coverage and available open data sources including data from meteorological stations, data on weather forecast, traffic cameras, public transport and agriculture phenomena. This team will also explore the way data can be exchanged between different sensor devices and platforms and stored using the SensLog 2.0.	Michal Kepka
TEAM 5	Agriculture Innovation Hub for Africa The intention is to develop a social space for the African agriculture community to share knowledge and experience between farmers, industry, research community, advisory services and others involved.	Jiri Kvapil, Petr Uhlir, Karel Charvat
TEAM 6	Open Data and Data Sharing in Agri-Food Chains in Africa This team will explore available data sources and data sharing practices between different stakeholders in the agri-food chain (farmers, service providers, advisors, food industry, machinery producers, etc.). This includes data catalogues, standards and data models that would work in Africa.	Raul Palma, Esther Dzalé Yeumo, Runar Bergheim, Karel Charvat
TEAM 7	Smart Points of Interest – Publication of Open Data in Africa as 5-star Linked Open Data This team will analyse available data sources of points of interest in Kenya and other African countries. The data will be harmonised and published as linked open data as an extension of the Smart Points of Interest database.	Ota Cerba, Karel Charvat, Raul Palma
TEAM 8	Citizen Science in Africa to Ground Truth & Exploit Earth Observation data In principle, there is great potential for citizen scientists – or the wider public – to validate what satellites observe or to put those images to use. In practice, the implementation of such ideas is faced by social, scientific, technical and economic challenges. This team will explore these challenges in order to develop ideas suitable for funding.	Uta Wehn, Raitis Berzins and Simon Leitgeb
TEAM 9	Open Transport Map (OTM) Applications for Africa The aim is to demonstrate how interactive traffic modelling applications can improve traffic situation in African cities. The demonstration consists in gathering open data and deploying the traffic modelling tool in Nairobi.	Dan Beran

REGISTRATION

In order to participate in the hackathon, please register at https://goo.gl/VME2ZG

You can join the teams mentioned above at any time between now and the end of April 2019. The registration is open to anyone from anywhere in the world as most of the hackathon is done virtually.

In case you will participate at the hackathon workshop within IST-Africa in Nairobi (10 May 2019), you need to register for the IST-Africa Conference itself.

TIMELINE

6 March 2019 – start of the hackathon, registration opens
(Beginning of April TBC) – a series of webinars introducing the teams and their progress. There are educational elements in these webinars.
1-7 May 2019 – preparing presentations for the workshop in Nairobi
10 May 2019 – presentation of the hackathon results at the workshop in Nairobi

ORGANISERS

Club of Ossiach – The Club of Ossiach is a group of agriculturists, agribusiness managers, agriculture and forestry technologists, environmentalists and agricultural ICT specialists from around the world.

EO4Agri – The main objective of EO4AGRI is to catalyze the evolution of the European capacity for improving operational agriculture monitoring from local to global levels based on information derived from Copernicus satellite observation data and through exploitation of associated geospatial and socio-economic information services. EO4AGRI assists the implementation of the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with special attention to the CAP2020 reform, to requirements of Paying Agencies, and for the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) processes.

**DataBio** – DataBio proposes to deploy a state of the art, big data platform “on top of the existing partners” infrastructure and solutions – the Big DATABIO Platform. The work will be continuous cooperation of experts from end user and technology provider companies, from bioeconomy and technology research institutes, and of other partners. In the pilots also associated partners and other stakeholders will be actively involved. The selected pilots and concepts will be transformed to pilot implementations utilizing co-innovative methods and tools where the bioeconomy sector end user experts and other stakeholders will give input to the user and sector domain understanding for the requirements specifications for ICT, Big Data and Earth Observation experts and for other solution providers in the consortium.

NextGEOSS – The NextGEOSS project will implement a federated data hub for access and exploitation of Earth Observation data, including user-friendly tools for data mining, discovery, access and exploitation. This data hub will be supported by a strong commitment to the engagement of Earth Observation and related communities, with the view of supporting the creation of innovative and business oriented applications.

**EUXDAT** – EUXDAT proposes an e-Infrastructure, which addresses agriculture, land monitoring and energy efficiency for a sustainable development, as a way to support planning policies. EUXDAT builds on existing mature components for solving them, by providing an advanced frontend, where users will develop applications on top of an infrastructure based on HPC and Cloud.

**PoliVisu** – Policy Development based on Advanced Geospatial Data Analytics and Visualisation. is a Research and Innovation project designed to evolve the traditional public policy making cycle using big data. The aim is to enhance an open set of digital tools to leverage data to help public sector decision-making become more democratic by (a) experimenting with different policy options through impact visualisation and (b) using the resulting visualisations to engage and harness the collective intelligence of policy stakeholders for collaborative solution development.

AfriAlliance – Africa-EU Innovation Alliance for Water and Climate – Africa is one of the regions most in need of innovative solutions for tackling water and climate change-related challenges; yet many parts of Africa are also suffering from the lack of water-related skills and capacity as well as wide-spread institutional fragmentation. AfriAlliance aims to better prepare Africa for future climate change challenges by having African and European stakeholders work together in the areas of water innovation, research, policy, and capacity development. One of the objectives of AfriAlliance is to help improve water and climate monitoring and forecasting processes and tools in Africa. AfriAlliance is developing a triple sensor approach, combining input from 1) remote sensors (satellite, drones, etc.), 2) in-situ sensors (e.g. official weather stations) and 3) human sensors (e.g. citizens’ own mobiles devices and private weather stations) and co-locating these in an online GeoDataPortal.

CODATA Blog

News from the CODATA community and from Simon Hodson, CODATA Executive Director