Newsline from EDINA
November 2005: Volume 10, Issue 3
EDINA is scoping a Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction (GRADE) as part of the JISC Digital Repositories Programme.
Repositories are important today for universities and colleges in helping to manage and capture intellectual assets, and for enabling the sharing of information and encouraging collaboration within communities. GRADE is investigating both the cultural and technical issues for storing geospatial data within repositories.
The aim of GRADE is to lay the foundations for a sustainable infrastructure that underwrites the geographic community's substantial investment in geospatial resources. Within the UK academic geographic community, discovery of the existence of geospatial data is enabled by Go-Geo!, and when an interested party discovers the existence of data they quite often want to access the data also. This is where GRADE plays a part.
GRADE will consider the suitability of today's repository software for enabling access to geospatial data. In particular, GRADE will focus on the sharing and reuse of derived geospatial data.
EDINA are keen to hear from anyone with an interest in advancing the sharing of geospatial research data. If you have data you'd like to make available, concerns over copyright restrictions on your derived data, or you have created an entirely new data set and would like to make it available for others to use but with relevant licence conditions attached, please contact us.
GRADE is led by EDINA with the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law, and the University of Southampton as partners.