Written by Martin Parr, Programme Manager, GODAN

Last week saw us take the GODAN message to Nottingham and the East Midlands Satellite Applications Centre of Excellence (EMBRACE). The occasion was a free one-day workshop to explore how geospatial technologies are transforming the farming industry. It was a great opportunity to give existing and potential new partners a bit of an update on what GODAN has been up to recently, and to profile some of the case studies we’ve been working on which capture the role that open data coming out of remote sensing satellite systems are being used in new applications and services.

Sometimes you have to go a long way to bump into people based on your doorstop, and this event was no exception as there was a good representation from the Satellite Catapult group, and GODAN Partner Rezatec from Harwell. Many of the researchers and enterprises represented at the event were already taking advantage of the huge volumes of open satellite data, and from the agriculture data recently released closer to home from Defra, however even in this very learned audience there was still some confusion about what defined truly open data, and many expressed frustrations that the licences given around data sets are often confusing, come with extra terms and conditions, and are often held in the small print some distance from the datasets themselves. Might the ODI’s open data certificate be useful to the community here?

Russell Lawley from the Soil Informatics Group at the British Geological Survey showcased UKSO, the UK Soil Observatory, a really great resource for mapping soil data, adding potentially over 140 layers on to basemaps, and crucially giving access to download that data where there is an open licence to do so.

UKSO is looking for other soil maps to add to their resource. I wonder if those 8000 datasets from Defra contain some soil data they could make use of and publicise.

Martin Parr’s presentation from the event is available here.

Click here to view all the presentations from the workshop.