GENESI-DR / Meraka ICT4EO / SAGrid meeting 28/08/2009

This topic documents the notes taken by BruceBecker during the meeting of 28/08/09

Present

• Meraka :
  1. Anwar Vahed (ICT4EO)
  2. Bruce Becker (SAGrid)
• ElsagDatamat? :
  1. Fabrizio Pacini (GENESI-DR)
  2. Marco Pappalardo (GENESI-DR)
  3. Stefano (GENESI-DR)

General Notes

The meeting was the first meeting between all three interested parties - Meraka ICT4EO, SAGrid and GENESI-DR. The purpose of the meeting was to formalise discussion around possible areas of collaboration between the interested parties. Fabrizio started by stating that there was clear interest and scope for such collaboration, and the first step to formalising this would be to sign a joint Memorandum of Understanding. In this MoU? would be defined the terms of the initial collaboration and the respective tasks and responsibilities of each party. A template for this MoU? could be provided by Fabrizio since they had similar agreements with other parties; Anwar and Bruce encouraged this, as it would help to speed things up. It should be noted though that there are possibly internal conditions which Meraka would impose on the MoU? , which have to be determined (by Anwar).

The first phase of the funded part of GENESI-DR would come to an end in April 2010 and currently a proposal is being considered to form a second phase of the project. Therefore, the MoU? referred to above would only cover the period from the present to April 2010 and the tasks should be defined accordingly - ie, avoiding tasks and projects which would take longer than this period to implement. Once the proposal to the July call of the FP7 is defined, it would be the case to discuss more in detail what role Meraka could play in a possible GENESI-DR2(1).

Possible sources of funding

The activities undertaken by South African parties should try to find funding from sources within South Africa, in order to cover both the actual researchers time and the travel forseen, in the absence of direct contributions from the European Commission. After a short brainstorming session, the following suggestions were proposed :

1. ESASTAP : European South African Science and Technology Advancement Programme
2. Bilateral funds from the Italian ministry of science, via the Italian embassy in South Africa
3. If French partners can be included , bilateral funds from the French embassy's SAFETI prgramme
4. Internal CSIR project funds
5. DST-related funds

Specific area of work

Due to the short timeframe, and focussing on showing some result by the end of GENESI-DR's lifetime, it was proposed to define areas of work which could reasonably be finished in that time. They were divided into two general categories :

• EO-specific
• grid-related

For the EO-specific category, Fabrizio expressed interest in pursuing the first item in the list provided by Anwar : GENESI-DR on Fire: Add vegetation fire services and products (MODIS, METEOSAT) to the GENESI-DR portal. This was received positively, especially the possibility of providing new data sources to integrate into GENESI-DR. However, Anwar requested more detailed information on the activities, products and services that GENESI-DR develops, in order to refine the idea of the work which he and his group would undertake. On the grid-related side, the idea remains to provide similar portals to what GENESI-DR provides, integrated into the SAGrid infrastructure, thereby giving South African researchers access to EO data and encouraging new uses and new applications.

Upcoming events of interest

Assuming that the collaboration proceeds as described above, it would be interesting to have a working meeting in South Africa.

EPIKH school (Cape Town)

Bruce informed all that there was a grid school run by EPIKH, hosted by SAGrid at the end of November in Cape Town. At this school, there will be two weeks of application development, and it would be a possible opportunity to bring some attention to an application being developed by Anwar's group - given that the application was reasonably mature by that stage. The trainers of the grid school would prepare a questionnaire which application developers would be invited to fill out and according to the results of this questionnaire, the GILDA team would choose which applications to work on. At the end of the school, there would be a workshop to present the results. It could be a very good opportunity to invite scientists in the field to attend the event and share ideas with ICT4EO. School pre-announcement at http://www.sagrid.ac.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=75:announcement-first-sa-epikh-school&catid=42:news

CHPC conference

Directly after the EPIKH school, the Centre for High-Performance conference will be held in Johannesburg, in concert with BELIEF-II. This would be a good opportunity to expand whatever results we have been able to achieve and it should be kept in mind in case there is a willingness to participate.

TODO

GENESI-DR

1. send around a draft of the MoU? to be completed and signed by Meraka.
2. communicate with coordinator of GENESI-DR to inform them of the progress made during these discussions and investigate the stance of the project towards collaboration with Meraka, with the ultimate goal of including Meraka in the proposal of the next round of GENESI-DRElsagDatamat? ">(2).
3. Some presentations and other information will be sent to Anwar in response to his request for more detailed information on the project. A list/description of already GENESI-fied Data Repositories will be provided as well.
4. investigate possible contact points in France which could be brought into the discussion, given the SAFETI agreement.

Anwar/ICT4EO

1. Investigate CSIR and DST sources of funding, for mobility
2. determine manpower which can be given to the project with the current scope
3. Determine contact points for data sources which could possibly be pulled into GENESI data repositories.

Bruce/SAGrid

1. Inform SAGrid site managers of the intent to host GENESI-DR applications and portal.
2. Investigate funding opportunities from bilateral sources and ESASTAP
3. Inform EPIKH coordinator and school organisers of the developments around this project, and establish possibility to have a focus on an EO application at the EPIKH grid school in Cape Town.

Jointly

1. Produce the list of the data owners and application providers in SA. We should describe the data/metadata formats and input/output formats for applications. Marco Pappalardo could take care of coordinating that.

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-- BruceBecker - 28 Aug 2009

• Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW BruceBecker AnwarV? TerenceVanZyl? MarcoPappalardo?
• Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE BruceBecker AnwarV? TerenceVanZyl? MarcoPappalardo?

Notes

1 : see Ict4EoAndGenesiDR for discussion on these areas

2 : -- BruceBecker - 28 Aug 2009 Of course, this is contingent on the project being resubmitted in a form that is still interesting to both Meraka and ElsagDatamat?

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