Complementing the European earth observation and geographic information body of knowledge with a business‐oriented perspective

Abstract

A body of knowledge (BoK) is an inventory of knowledge or concepts of a domain that serves as a reference vocabulary for various purposes, such as the development of curricula, the preparation of job descriptions, and the description of occupational profiles. To fulfill its purpose, a BoK needs to be up‐to‐date and ideally widely accepted by academia as well as the private and public sectors. This article presents the initiative taken in the Earth observation and geographic information (EO*GI) domain to provide a current, comprehensive education‐ and business‐oriented EO*GI BoK called EO4GEO BoK. In particular, an approach to strengthen the business‐oriented perspective in the EO4GEO BoK is presented. This approach is based on the analysis of professional tasks and the mapping of these tasks to concepts and skills contained in the BoK. A critical reflection of the proposed approach that is based on the experiences gained during a workshop complements this article.

Knowledge and Skills Related to Active Optical Sensors in the Body of Knowledge for Earth Observation and Geoinformation (Eo4geo Bok)

“…It aims at adding new topics from the EO sector and updating the GI part, building a comprehensive knowledge of both EO and GI (Stelmaszczuk-Górska et al, 2020a), and creating a bridge to potential other BoKs, such as a surveying BoK. Additionally, it focuses on expanding user uptake by adding a business-oriented perspective (Hofer et al, 2020). The current implementation of the EO4GEO BoK is organized in seven working groups (WGs) (Stelmaszczuk-Górska et al, 2020a), three of them on updating topics related to geoinformation, three on new Earth Observation topics and one on thematic applications.…”

“…The skills are combinations of verbs and a concept-relevant statement based on the title of the corresponding BoK concept. The verbs are grouped into a six classes taxonomy as defined in Hofer et al (2020). They range from passive verbs ("remember", "understand") to higher-level active verbs such as "evaluate" and "create".…”

“…As such, for the definition of curricula or job descriptions, skills of a particular EQF level and their corresponding concepts can be selected, relating the concepts with each other. As mentioned in Section 3.3., the skills related to the active optical sensors have been defined according to a six level taxonomy (Hofer et al, 2020) which ranges from more abstract verbs, relevant for describing e.g. course objectives (lower taxonomy levels), to more concrete verbs, relevant for task definition in e.g.…”

“…The rapidly and exponentially growing data quantity in the field of Earth Observation and Geoinformation (EO*GI), associated with an open policy for most of these data and new algorithms, triggers a paradigm shift in learning and knowledge transfer (Sudmanns et al, 2019). In order to take into account the latest approaches and respond to upcoming challenges in EO*GI education and the labour market (Hofer et al, 2020), the project "Towards an innovative strategy for skills development and capacity building in the space geo-information sector supporting Copernicus user uptake" (EO4GEO; http://www.eo4geo.eu/) defines new and specific knowledge and skills for the creation of curricula and training actions. One of the principal goals of EO4GEO is to bring together experts from different specific areas of the EO*GI domain to create an exhaustive and comprehensive, structured knowledge that can be used to define and develop training actions or curricula in the EO*GI sector.…”

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“…The EO4GEO BoK, developed as part of the Erasmus + Sector Skills Alliance project EO4GEO (http://eo-4geo.eu), builds on a revision of the European geographic information science and technology (GIS&T) BoK (Vandenbroucke & Vancauwenberghe, 2016), which itself stems from the original UCGIS GIS&T BoK (Wilson, 2014). Leveraging the input from a network of over 150 domain experts, the European GIS&T BoK is currently being extended with EO concepts and their relationships, as well as related skills that indicate the practical use of these concepts.…”