120 mins GSDI telecon chaired by President Prof. Abbas Rajabifard

HUNAGI representative made an overview on the Workplan of GSDI Legal and Socioeconomic Committee formulated by Chair Roger Longhorn and gave a summary on the sixth Digital Earth Symposium held in Beijing as well as the eSDI-Net+ project workshop held in Krakow last week. Mention was made on the forthcoming eSDI-NET+ Conference will be held in Torino in November devoted to the award ceremony on best practices on local, regional, subnational and thematic SDI categories
Detail from the draft minutes: "Referring to the agenda 9a: Legal and Socioeconomic Committee, Gabor Remetey reports the draft workplan prepared by Chair Roger Longhorn. There are five topics focused:
1. Increase members of the Committee and promote the e-mail list more widely,
2. Continue to complete the GSDI SDI Cookbook Wiki's new chapter with SDI Best Practices and enrich related repository (http://gsdidocs.org/GSDIWiki/ )
3. Information activities relating to Legal Issues, having 5 expected results mainly on legislative framework including INSPIRE and PSI matters
4. Information activities relating to Economic Issues, having 4 expected results related to repository, business models and SDI programme management
5. Information activities relating to Social issues having 3 expected results related to ethical aspects
These three last topics are orchestrated by Subcommittees.
Recently, interest was shown to join to or monitor the Committee's activities by Peter Woodgate from Australia and Bob Chen of CODATA/CIESIN respectively.
The 6th Symposium on Digital Earth was held in Beijing between 9-12 September. The event had a high profile on the host side and well attended by the international scientific community (including academies, space agencies, universities and R+D sites). Over 900 papers were received. The event was devoted to the tenth anniversary of the 1st DE Symposium and its Beijing Declaration of 1999.
The Declaration was revisited and a new document was formulated and accepted by the Closing Ceremony participants. The new Beijing Declaration refers to the spatial data infrastructure explicitely. GSDI Association provided good visibility. Past President Bas Kok gave a welcome speech and he made an in-depth presentation emphasizing the bridging between the geospatial and Digital Earth communities. Parallel sessions addressed SDIs, and many GSDI Board members delivered lectures on best practices, role of SDIs in Digital Earth, standards and data policy.
Also mention was made on a media-related issue in the GSDI12 context. In the Editorial Board meeting of the Int J of Digital Earth Ms. Christina Low, Managing Editor of Taylor & Francis Asia Pacific in Singapore expressed her interest to get more information on the GSDI12. Her coordinates: christina.low@tandf.com.sg."