Back from the OneGeology meeting in Rome

I'm just back from the kick-off meeting of the OneGeology-Europe (1G-E) initiative in Rome, a 29-nation project to build a continent-wide geoscience data network, comparable to the Geoscience Information Network (GIN) that AZGS is heading up in the U.S.

The project, funded by the European Union, invited me to be on their advisory board to help ensure our two networks will be integrated and interoperable. It’s pretty clear that we are in agreement on all the major concepts and directions of the two data networks. We are discussing ways to link the two projects across all the working levels. There is also a companion EU project for GIS data and capabilities, the European Spatial Data Infrastructure Network (EDSIN) run by Eurogeographics, that looks to be a great collaborator.

In a related note, we finished negotiating budget revisions and completing the standard paperwork on the NSF funding for GIN, so we got approval two days ago to launch our 3-year project. We are organizing a workshop on GIN for the GSA annual meeting in Houston, for Saturday, October 4 to expose GIN to the geoscience community and invite wider participation.

I hoped to be blogging from Italy but the pace was so busy that I could barely keep up with email let alone post about what was happening. But I did take two days after the meetings to visit the ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried by eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. When I catch up, I plan on sharing some observations and photos about this.