The Space/Geospatial Sector Skills Alliance

Towards an innovative strategy for skills development and capacity building in the space geo-information sector supporting Copernicus User Uptake

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EO4GEO is an ERASMUS+ Sector Skills Alliance

Sector Skills Alliances are transnational projects which aim to tackle skills gaps with regard to one or more occupational profiles in a specific sector through a coherent and comprehensive set of activities and outputs.

key figures

• Duration: 4 years from January the 1st, 2018
• Budget: 3,87 million €
• Partnership: 25 Partners + 30+ Associated Partners (from 16 EU Countries) from Academia, Companies and networks
• Coordinators: GISIG (General), KU Leuven (Scientific & Technological), PLUS (Education & Training), Climate-KIC (Exploitation)

The VISION

To foster the growth of the European Earth Observation / Geographic Information (EO/GI) sector ensuring a workforce with the right skills, in the right place, at the right time.

The MISSION

To ensure the strategic cooperation among stakeholders on skills development in the EO/GI sector.

Strategic importance

EO4GEO aims at implementing a new approach (“Blueprint”) in the Space/Geospatial Sector:

• To improve the quality and relevance of training and other ways of acquiring skills 
• To make skills more visible and comparable
• To enable people make better career choices, find quality jobs and improve their life chances

The "user uptake" context

Most EO4GEO partners are part of the Copernicus Academy Network .

EO4GEO is linked to the Copernicus Building Skills Action , aiming to:

• Increase the number of people able to access and use Copernicus data and information (basic users and/or advanced/innovative users of Copernicus)
• Increase the supply of skills to stimulate the growth of geospatial-related jobs in Europe

The strategy

• Identifying the supply of GI and EO education and training at the academic and vocational levels.
• Identifying the current demand for GI and EO skills and occupational profiles.
• Assessing the skills shortages, gaps and mismatches between supply and demand.
• Analysing trends, challenges and opportunities in the GI and EO sector.
• Defining a GI and EO sector skills strategy for skills development.

The instruments

• An ontology-based Body of Knowledge (BoK) for the space/geospatial sector (extending the existing GI BoK with EO/Copernicus concepts).
  
  
• A set of BoK-based innovative tools.
  
  
• A series of curricula and a portfolio of training modules directly usable in the context of Copernicus and other relevant programs.
  
  
• A series of learning actions for a selected set of strategeic scenario’s in three sub-sectors to test the approach.
  
  
• A Long-term Action Plan to be endorsed to roll-out and sustain the proposed solutions.
  
  
• The support of a strong group of Associated Partners mostly consisting of associations or networks active in space/geospatial domain.

An Ontology-based Body of Knowledge

A Body of Knowledge (BoK) is the complete set of concepts and relations between them, that make up a professional domain that can be used by members of a discipline to guide their education and work practice.

Describing the Geographic Information and Earth Observation domain is done by defining the underpinning inter-related concepts (theories, methods, technologies, etc.) that should be covered in education and training curricula.

But, what is a Concept?

A concept is a theoretical construct that has been formed by combining particular instances into a general idea. Concepts relate with each other via meaningful connections, such as “is defined by”, “is a kind of”, “is a property of”. The concepts and the connections together form the ontology of a certain knowledge area and can be displayed as a “concept map”.

EO4GEO BoK concept map

Innovative and open tools

A set of independent yet collaborating tools with the Body of Knowledge at the centre

The EO4GEO tools environment

EO4GEO BoK Platform allows the following functionalities: Bok is openly available online & usable by everybody. BoK uses permanent URLs. Everybody can refer to the BoK. BoK is programmatically accessible. Everybody can build tools based on BoK.

EO4GEO's open tools making use of the BoK

• Curriculum Design tool: Create, edit and find EO & GI Curriculum using concepts from the EO4GEO Body of Knowledge.
  
  
• BoK visualisation and search: Auxiliary tool to search terms in BoK concepts. The tool shows matching results, and allows navigating graphically and textually in the BoK.
  
  
• Occupational Profile tool: This tool allows to create occupational job profiles and connect them with BoK concepts (Knowledge) and ESCO (skills).
  
  
• Job Offer tool: This tool allows to create job offers based on occupational profiles.
  
  
• BoK Matching tool: This tool allows to compare two annotated BoK resources, as metadata "annotated" PDFs or a EO4GEO resource created in the other tools.
  
  
• BoK Annotation Tool: This tool allows to easily annotate (associate) any PDF document with EO4GEO BoK concepts. 

EO4GEO is much more

• A series of pre-defined curricula in support of Copernicus.
  
  
• A portfolio of training modules directly usable in the context of Copernicus and other relevant programs.
  
  
• A series of training actions (webinars, academic courses, etc.) in three sub-sectors - integrated applications, smart cities and climate change.
  
  
• A mobility program to promote internships and on-the-job training.
  
  
• A Long-term Action Plan to sustain the proposed solutions. 

Follow us and get engaged!

• Join the Sector Skills Alliance .
  
• Join as an expert to revise / feed the Body of Knowledge.
  
• Subscribe to our project Newsletter.
  
• Connect your project and establish synergies.
  

www.eo4geo.eu

@EO4GEOtalks