Open-source tools and Open Science practices inspiring co-creation of geospatial data infrastructures – reflections from Finland and Tanzania

During the last ten years, we have been witnessing a rapid growth in both sources and quantities of digital data, opensource (FOSS) technologies and geospatial tools and services in the society.Through expansion of mobile technologies, new digital devices, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and cloud infrastructures, societies and individuals have become more responsive to fluent access to up-to-date digital geospatial data.These rapid technological advancements and diverse data sources have provided a conducive environment for the co-creation of SDIs and different platforms and digital open spaces for data sharing, refinement and value-creation (Dangermond and Goodchild 2020).Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) of the 21 st century have a substantial yet also a greater role in ensuring sustainable digital transformation.This is since our societies are increasingly depended on open-access, dynamic and replicable data ecosystems for improved decision-making.Today's geospatial data infrastructures operate in the web to meet the openness, access and community engagement demands and they also facilitate integration of diverse data sources effectively whilst ensuring data provenance for replicability (Kotsev et al. 2020).In our presentation, we are comparing and presenting lessons learnt from the co-creation processes of four different digital geospatial data-driven research and learning infrastructures, which are currently operative in Finland and Tanzania.These spatial data infrastructures are: 1) Geoportti Research Infrastructure (Geoportti RI, https://www.geoportti.fi/),which is an open Geospatial Research and Education Hub for Finnish researchers and students, 2) Lounaistieto Regional SDI (https://www.lounaistieto.fi/), which is an open data service and community in Southwest Finland, 3) Climate Risk Database (CRD, https://geonode.resilienceacademy.ac.tz/), which is an open geospatial data platform and communitycurated geospatial data service hosted by the Tanzania Resilience Academy, and 4) UTU Geospatial Data Service (https://geonode.utu.fi/), which is an open geospatial data sharing platform of the University of Turku, dedicated for the researchers and students implementing Open Science agenda.Geoportti Research Infrastructure (Geoportti RI) provides Finnish scientists with an easy access to geospatial data and geocomputing resources at centralized high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud infrastructure at the IT Center for Science (CSC).Geoportti RI's objective is to encourage widespread utilization of geographical data and geoinformatics methods in both research and university education.Furthermore, it seeks to stimulate innovation in geospatial data and digital technology on a broader societal scale.The Geoportti research infrastructure has been co-created through 20 years of cooperation between key geospatial research and academic institutions in Finland.During the last few years, more emphasis has been put on research competence, innovation, and excellence development, alongside a significant upgrade of a number of the existing services.Currently, Geoportti RI consists of seven categories of services (Figure 1): 1) Geodata and metadata services, 2) Research data and source code storing and sharing services, 3) Emerging technology laboratories and tools services, 4) High-performance computing (HPC) geoprocessing and geoanalytics services, 5) Virtualization services, 6) Skills