The memorandum is the result of previous collaborations since 2014, regarding the preservation of open geospatial as part of the record of science: since 2006, OSGeo hosts a range of annual open geospatial conferences at the regional, national, and global levels, commonly referred to as Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G). Conference video recordings from these FOSS4G conferences have become a valuable source for state-of-the-art geo-information which are used in research, industry and education. FOSS4G conference videos, and other video content related to the OSGeo software communities require easy access, long term preservation and reliable scientific citation.
TIB recognizes the FOSS4G conference recordings as significant scientific content, by including these as indexed records in the TIB Video Portal “AV-Portal”, a web-based platform for quality-tested scientific videos.
The TIB AV-Portal already contains all available video recordings from past FOSS4G conferences on the global scale, plus regional conferences for North-America, and the German speaking nations Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Historical recordings from earlier open geospatial events are also available in the AV-Portal dating back until 2001.
OSGeo volunteers and TIB staff collaborate closely to ensure that new conference videos from recently held conferences will be available in the TIB AV-Portal as soon as possible.
In addition, for the German-speaking FOSSGIS conference series, all conference abstracts are also collected by TIB.
Based on these well-established working relations, both organisations have agreed
- To assist in developing an open archive for discovery of FOSS4G event materials
- To preserve past scientific documents and materials as part of OSGeo foundation projects
- To work closely with existing initiatives such as GeoForAll, OSGeo’s education arm, to help archive necessary geospatial research
- To enhance the discoverability of OSGeo-related content by performing ongoing research and development activities (including automated metadata enrichment, linked open data, and ontology-based approaches)
MoU OSGeo TIB signed in march 2018 (pdf)
About TIB
The TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology is the German National Library of Science and Technology and a member of the Leibniz Association. It is jointly funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the 16 German states. As a research library, it conducts applied research and development in order to generate new services and optimise existing ones. Its key areas of research are in the fields of Data Science & Digital Libraries, Non-Textual Material, Open Knowledge, Open Science and Visual Analytics. With a collection of over 9 million items in 2017, the TIB is the largest library for science and technology in the world. TIB’s AV-Portal allows to search for and access scientific videos from the fields of science and technology and hosts OSGeo conference recordings (FOSS4G, FOSSGIS etc.) and other OSGeo video material.
About OSGeo
OSGeo is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2006 whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open source geospatial technologies and data. The Foundation provides financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit. In 2018 OSGeo is the home for over 30 geospatial open source projects, and the OSGeo foundation has over 30,000 members. Since 2006 OSGeo has also hosted the widely popular international FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) conference, rotating it all over the globe each year.
Read more about partnerships with OSGeo here.
