Today many aspects of geospatial science including information, standards and tools are created and developed as "open". The effect of this openness is not only the free access but also the spreading of knowledge and responsibility to the whole community: The users can also be creators and developers, thus the open geospatial community requires educated and informed users.
The objective of this project is to enable the wider community (not just GIS experts) to make use of open source geospatial tools for solving real world problems. Currently, there is a big learning curve for new users to understand and use these technologies and if a general take-up of them is to be achieved it is necessary that an open, interactive, user friendly learning framework is developed based on case study examples.
The outcome of ELOGeo is an organized collection of e-learning courses in different media types, adopted from the reusable materials of the project collaborators. We will collaborate with the Landmap Service - Mimas which has a well established Learning Zone for delivering the e-learning courses. Landmap will provide a hosting platform to maintain the materials a the new e-learning content to the wider community. So the additional longer term outcome will be an open virtual community of teachers/learners in the open geospatial science.
We will also be building OSGeo case studies -i.e. training examples- for open data, open standards building upon content available at Open-source Geospatial Foundation's Education Repository and making the content available to all and back to OSGeo Educational Repository. The project outputs are reusable under Creative Commons Licensing in order to support the open geospatial community.
The first paragraph makes a really valid point that doesn't get brought up when talking about the open world we're now starting to live in. Knowledge and data certainly is more spread out now it's open and some people don't find everything that exists already and could help them.
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