The ICRAF GeoScience Lab (GSL) recently participated in the CGIAR CSI meeting in Enschede, the Netherlands. During this meeting, the Landscapes Portal was presented (presentation link) along with some of its salient features (e.g time series tools, blog module etc.).

CGIAR is in the process of finalizing its Open Data policy and soon all 15 centers will participate in this initiative. ICRAF, being one of the CGIAR centers, has been complying with the CGIAR Open Data policy since 2012 and is in the process of making its spatial data available publicly.

ICRAF's spatial data sharing platform (the Landscapes Portal) is ready and is being used by hundreds of users worldwide to upload archived data-sets. For non-spatial data, ICRAF's Research Method Group (RMG) is using dataverse and Knowledge Management is using (VIVO).

During the CSI meeting, it was decided that all CGIAR centers will use GDAL read and write formats for data sharing (with emphasis on Geotiff for raster and shape file for vector). The draft data policy favors Dublin Core as the metadata standard, but this has not been finalized. The Landscapes Portal uses ISO19139 but in the case of metadata harvesting, Dublin core translation is supported. There is generally an increasing interest for Open Source GIS tools among CGIAR centers. CSI-2014 meeting ended with a nice trip to a Windmill near ITC (Enschede).