Friday, July 24th between 3 – 4 pm Central Time
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has placed the US and the world into an extremely challenging situation as populations and businesses experience massive impacts. During this worldwide fight against COVID-19, the geospatial data being rapidly collected are increasingly complex and broad in their coverage. Harnessing such geospatial data poses tremendous challenges to geospatial software, advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI), and related research communities, due to the complexity of the geospatial software ecosystem and the inherently interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of COVID-19 problems. The challenges posed are both social and technical in nature, including finding the right tools, building interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary partnerships, and ensuring that research findings are readily accessible and reproducible. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded a project to conceptualize a Geospatial Software Institute (GSI; https://gsi.cigi.illinois.edu/) for establishing a long-term hub of excellence in geospatial software infrastructure that can serve diverse research and education communities by creating bridges across science domains. This GSI conceptualization project is well-positioned to contribute to advancing COVID-19 research and education in significant ways by strategically and synergistically engaging diverse scientific communities.
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