February 28, 2008

The University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, was the site of two international meetings held this week, in which CIESIN director Robert Chen and geographic information specialist Greg Yetman participated actively.

The Tenth International Conference for Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI-10) attracted experts on geospatial data, tools, and systems from around the world. Yetman, who is a member of the GSDI Association Board, led a workshop on the assessment of infrastructure and population in the low-elevation coastal zone and later gave a talk on CIESIN's work on coastal vulnerability to sea level rise. As co-chair of the GSDI technical committee, he ran a session with Doug Nebert of the Federal Geographic Data Committee on updates to the Spatial Data Infrastructure Cookbook. He also attended the GSDI Association pre-conference board and council meetings, where activities for the coming year were planned and a new president and board members were elected.

Chen presented a paper co-authored with Paul Uhlir of the U.S. National Research Council on development of proposed guidelines for implementing the data sharing principles of the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS). A workshop on poverty mapping featuring poverty data from CIESIN's Global Poverty Mapping Project was also presented by researchers from the University of the West Indies.

In conjunction with GSDI-10, the Task Group on Data and Scenario Support for Impact and Climate Analysis (TGICA) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held its 14th meeting February 26--28. The meeting focused on interdisciplinary data integration and access needs for the broad scientific and policy communities concerned with climate change. The Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), operated by CIESIN under contract to NASA, works with groups in the United Kingdom and Germany to provide access to data and scenarios used in the IPCC assessments. On February 28, Chen co-chaired a joint GSDI-TGICA session that addressed the spatial aspects of climate change vulnerability, impacts, adaptation, and mitigation.

See:

GSDI
TGICA
IPCC Data Distribution Centre