Res Communis

EuroSites European Ocean Observatory Network Data Policy Available

by Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz with the blog faculty

Source: EuroSites

Data policy for EC funded research projects. Download

GSDI 12 World Conference: Realising Spatially Enabled Societies

by P.J. Blount with the blog faculty

GSDI 12 World Conference will be held in Singapore on October 19-22, and will have the theme Realising Spatially Enabled Societies. The call for papers is now open:

(1) Call for Conference Proceedings Submissions

Abstracts should be 250-500 words in length and will be reviewed by the GSDI-12 Conference Program Committee. Authors are limited to a maximum of two conference paper abstract submissions, whether as lead or secondary author.

Presentations will be organized in the following tracks, but authors are invited as well to submit presentations that fall outside of these topical tracks. The tracks identified by number are as follows:

1. Experiences in developing spatial data infrastructure initiatives, projects and programs at the following levels:
1. local and regional;
2. national,
3. multi-national, and
4. global
2. Applications arising from the use of improved spatial data infrastructure or spatially enabling citizens or government including applications related to:
1. poverty alleviation;
2. environmental sustainability and energy;
3. e-government;
4. e-commerce;
5. disaster prevention, management and response;
6. health, safety or public order;
7. transportation;
8. administering or managing property (cadaster), land uses, housing, or spatial planning;
9. managing natural resources such as oceans, forests, and rivers;
10. consumer products (e.g. navigation and gaming);
11. other applications
3. Geographic data issues
4. Geographic metadata, maintenance and updating issues and initiatives
5. Registries, portals,clearinghouses and archives
6. Web-based services for discovery, access, processing and product generation
7. Standards and interoperability Issues
8. Legal, ethics, policy, and economic issues
9. Institutional, administrative, and management Issues
10. Emerging participatory, inclusive and collaborative approaches in Developing Content and Infrastructure (e.g. participatory GIS, geoweb tools, data commons, collaborative commercial and open source software production approaches, volunteered geographic information, global geo efforts)
11. Capacity building and education, Knowledge Exchange (e.g. among research, development, education and professional practice communities as well as throughout society)
12. Basic and applied research methods and results
13. Other

High-quality submissions will be accepted for presentation at the conference. Abstracts and follow-up full articles will be published in a conference proceedings volume to be made available on CD. For follow-up full paper submissions, authors retain copyright in their work but will be required to agree to a Creative Commons License to help ensure continued global access to their work over time. All publications produced for the conference, including abstracts, full papers and presentation slides, will be openly archived eventually at gsdi.org/gsdiConferences

Proceedings Submission Deadlines

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 April 2010
Deadline for submission of full papers (if author wants consideration as a refereed paper in the proceedings): 1 April 2010
Notification of acceptance or rejection for paper session and poster presentations: 1 June 2010
Notification of acceptance or rejection for refereed proceedings article: 1 June 2010
Deadline for submission of full papers for proceedings (non-refereed but still considered for journal special issue): 1 July 2010
Deadline for full conference registration payment for all oral and poster presenters: 1 August 2010
GSDI-12 conference dates: 19-22 October 2010

Google, Citing Attack, Threatens to Exit China

by Joanne Irene Gabrynowicz with the blog faculty

Source: NY Times
By ANDREW JACOBS and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: January 12, 2010
This article was reported by Andrew Jacobs, Miguel Helft and John Markoff and written by Mr. Jacobs.

BEIJING — Google said Tuesday that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country altogether, citing assaults from hackers on its computer systems and China’s attempts to “limit free speech on the Web.”

The move, if followed through, would be a highly unusual rebuke of China by one of the largest and most admired technology companies, which had for years coveted China’s 300 million Web users.
Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online.

Google linked its decision to sophisticated cyberattacks on its computer systems that it suspected originated in China and that were aimed, at least in part, at the Gmail user accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Those attacks, which Google said took place last week, were directed at some 34 companies or entities, most of them in Silicon Valley, California, according to people with knowledge of Google’s investigation into the matter. The attackers may have succeeded in penetrating elaborate computer security systems and obtaining crucial corporate data and software source codes, though Google said it did not itself suffer losses of that kind.

While the scope of the hacking and the motivations and identities of the hackers remained uncertain, Google’s response amounted to an unambiguous repudiation of its own five-year courtship of the vast China market, which most major multinational companies consider crucial to their growth prospects. It is also likely to enrage the Chinese authorities, who deny that they censor the Internet and are accustomed to having major foreign companies adapt their practices to Chinese norms.
The company said it would try to negotiate a new arrangement to provide uncensored results on its search site, google.cn. But that is a highly unlikely prospect in a country that has the most sweeping Web filtering system in the world. Google said it would otherwise cease to run google.cn and would consider shutting its offices in China, where it employs some 700 people, many of them highly compensated software engineers, and has an estimated $300 million in annual revenue.

Google executives declined to discuss in detail their reasons for overturning their China strategy. But despite a costly investment, the company has a much smaller share of the search market here than it does in other major markets, commanding only about one in three searches by Chinese. The leader in searches, Baidu, is a Chinese-run company that enjoys a close relationship with the government.
Google executives have privately fretted for years that the company’s decision to censor the search results on google.cn, to filter out topics banned by Chinese censors, was out of sync with the company’s official motto, “Don’t be evil.”

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” David Drummond, senior vice president for corporate development and the chief legal officer, said in a statement.
Wenqi Gao, a spokesman for the Chinese Consulate in New York, said he did not see any problems with google.cn. “I want to reaffirm that China is committed to protecting the legitimate rights and interests of foreign companies in our country,” he said in a phone interview.

In China, search requests that include words like “Tiananmen Square massacre” or “Dalai Lama” come up blank. In recent months, the government has also blocked YouTube, Google’s video-sharing service.
While Google’s business in China is now small, analysts say that the country could soon become one of the most lucrative Internet and mobile markets, and a withdrawal would significantly reduce Google’s long-term growth.

“The consequences of not playing the China market could be very big for any company, but particularly for an Internet company that makes its money from advertising,” said David B. Yoffie, a Harvard Business School professor. Mr. Yoffie said advertising played an even bigger role in the Internet in China than it did in the United States. At the time of its arrival, the company said that it believed that the benefits of its presence in China outweighed the downside of being forced to censor some search results here, as it would provide more information and openness to Chinese citizens. The company, however, has repeatedly said that it would monitor restrictions in China.
Google’s announcement Tuesday drew praise from free speech and human rights advocates, many of whom had criticized the company in the past over its decision to enter the Chinese market despite censorship requirements.

“I think it’s both the right move and a brilliant one,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a legal scholar at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.