Advances in FAIR Geospatial Datasets

Dear Colleagues,

In today’s world, geographical datasets, ranging from latest satellite imageries to scanned gazetteers, are essential for informing us of our complex world, monitoring our environment, establishing policies, and developing new services.

The necessity of discovering and reusing geographical datasets was identified in the 1990s to lower production cost and achieve consistency and trust between different domains by integrating datasets across these domains. Communities investigated the production and exploitation of metadata and specific cataloguing services and interfaces to cope with the heterogeneities of datasets and with the expertise gap between end users and these assets. Heterogeneities occur across themes, across scales, and across territories. The expertise gap is more complex, as data accessibility is often closely related to accessing the appropriate tools to process, interpret, and render the datasets. Renewed interest came with the open science movement and FAIR principles (to improve the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse of digital assets), as well as with data marketplaces and dataset search engines.

Taking into account the above arguments, this Special Issue volume focuses on the discoverability, interoperability, and reusability of datasets with a geospatial component on open infrastructures. It welcomes contributions from the domains of open science and FAIR principles, as well as the domain of semantic Web and micro-ontologies adapted to the specific case of geographical datasets. It also welcomes contributions from the domains of spatial data infrastructures, quality documentation platforms, and non-technical aspects linked, for example, to governance that can strongly promote or severely hinder data sharing in a FAIR ecosystem.

Dr. Ali Mansourian
Prof. Dr. Joep Crompvoets
Dr. Benedicte Bucher
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Geographies is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• FAIR
• open data
• data governance