THE ADDED VALUE OF SCIENTIFIC NETWORKING: 1FSTQFDUJWFTGSPNUIF(&0*%&/FUXPSL.FNCFST 1998-2012 NICHOLAS CHRISMAN MONICA WACHOWICZ THE ADDED VALUE OF SCIENTIFIC NETWORKING: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE GEOIDE NETWORK MEMBERS 1998-2012 THE ADDED VALUE OF SCIENTIFIC NETWORKING: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE GEOIDE NETWORK MEMBERS 1998-2012 Edited by Nicholas Chrisman and Monica Wachowicz First published 2012 by GEOIDE Network GEOIDE Network, Pavillon Louis-Jacques-Casault 1055, avenue du Séminaire, Local 2306, Cité Universitaire Québec (Québec) G1V 0A6 CANADA © 2012 GEOIDE Network Printed and bound in Canada by GEOIDE Network. All contributions in this book are copyright by the authors, published in this volume article under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode). Reproduction by any means is subject to the terms of this license, particularly the requirement concerning attribu- tion of the author and their rights. A non-legal summary: you are free to share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work; to remix — to adapt the work; to make commercial use of the work, under the condition: attribution — you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Every effort has been made to ensure that the advice and information in this book is true and accurate at the time of going to press. However, neither the publisher nor the authors can accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. Cover design: MS Communication ISBN 978-1-927371-68-8 Preface What is GEOIDE? Certainly it has been a Network of Centres of Excellence, a source of funding. But to many it has been more: a vision, a multidiscipli- nary community, a variety of new generation tools, innovative approaches, successful spin-offs as well as a part of Canadian academic, education and research life for the past fourteen years. This book explores the trajectory of GEOIDE, Canada’s geomatics network which has served the education, industry, government and research communi- ty, from its inception in 1998 to its state in 2012. The call for chapters aimed to address two important questions. Does it make any difference to organize multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional projects? What is the value-added by the network form of collaboration? These questions remain unanswered as long as there are limited anecdotal results. A big part of the problem is the lack of long-term follow-up as researchers all move on from one project to the next. This book provides a moment of reflection in this rush to the next new things. It assembles contributions from a number of distinct perspectives, each re- sponding to the basic questions. The first five chapters in this book describe some of the lessons learned over GEOIDE’s history. Chapter 1 provides an outline of the history of the Net- work, written by two of the Scientific Directors who managed the operation. It provides a framework in which the subsequent chapters can be located. It also set out a list of many of the people that made GEOIDE possible. Chapter 2 continues the narrative of GEOIDE’s history, specifically with re- spect to the students’ organizations of the Network. Rodolphe Devillers, Tri- salyn Nelson and Steve Liang joined the network as PhD students while GEOIDE was getting organized. In their chapter; they provide their perspec- tive on the GEOIDE Students’ Network (GSN) and its synergy with the V GEOIDE Summer School (GSS). They describe the main stages in the devel- opment of those initiatives in addition to the different actors, discussing the successes but also the challenges and the failures. In drawing lessons from those facts, they come with a number of recommendations that can be used by other organizations that would like to create and benefit from GEOIDE’s ex- perience. Continuing this theme of lessons learned, Teresa Scassa, Jennifer Chandler, Yvan Bédard and Marc Gervais draw attention to how the GEOIDE Phase IV broke with the tradition of funding science-led collaborative research projects by supporting an innovative project where the legal and ethical issues were at the forefront of the research agenda (Chapter 3). Their perspective on this project demonstrates the value from bringing together key researchers linking legal, ethical and technological solutions to emerging normative challenges raised by digital geospatial data. The importance of an interdisciplinary learning environment is voiced by Charmaine Dean, W. John Braun, David Martell, and Douglas Woolford. In their chapter (4), they give us their perspective on the essential ingredients which they believe have contributed to the interdisciplinary collaboration and training successes that took place on their GEOIDE teams. They show the way on how joint training can be extremely useful provided the students’ in- terests remain paramount throughout the collaboration. Finally, the chapter (5) written by Kevin Schwartzman, Paul Brassard, Jason Gilliland, François Dufaux, Kevin Henry, David Buckeridge and Sherry Ol- son examines a twelve-year collaboration by giving their perspective on how they got started, where did collaboration took them, and where will it might take them next. Along the particular frontiers between epidemiologists, archi- tects, historians, and geographers, they make some generalizations about the benefits of networking and their personal and institutional assets have proven to be useful. The second part of this book includes five more chapters that focus on the transformative nature of the research conducted within the network. The first perspective (Chapter 6) is on the transformative nature of the research de- scribed by Pamela Tudge, Renee Sieber, Yolanda Wiersma, Jon Corbett, Ste- ven Chung, Patrick Allen, and Pamela Robinson on The Participatory Ge- oWeb for Engaging the Public on Global Environmental Change. Their team has sparked unlikely alliances and predictable hurdles, but it has also shown that everyone had the opportunity to be a scientist as they have collaborated towards innovation. They were guided by three research questions: What de- fines effective public participation on the GeoWeb? How do we contextualize VI web-based environmental change models and data on the GeoWeb? And fi- nally, how do we build a cyber-infrastructure and enabling policies that serve this two-way engagement? Geolive is now being deployed by the university associates in partnership with four community organizations based in British Columbia and Ontario, each working at different spatial extents (from the local, to provincial to national level) and on different issues. These organiza- tions include: The i2i Intergenerational Society of Canada, the Kawartha Her- itage Conservancy, the Ottawa River Institute and The Sustaining What We Value Project (a collective of several non-government organizations and gov- ernment agencies). The second perspective (Chapter 7) is on the transformative nature of the re- search described by Bernard Moulin on multi-agent and population-based geo-simulations for decision support. This chapter tells the ‘inner story’ of these 12 years of research which, in retrospect appear as a complete and artic- ulated research program on MAGS for decision support. It presents the main milestones of this program and emphasizes how the GEOIDE Network pro- vided opportunities to team up with industrial and governmental partners and different Canadian and international research teams in a series of projects, PADI-Simul, MAGS, MUSCAMAGS and CODIGEOSIM, and a constella- tion of companion projects. The third perspective is about the transformative research in the development of Mobile Educational Games as described by Rob Harrap, Sylvie Daniel, Michael Power, Joshua Pearce and Nicholas Hedley. In their chapter (8), they pave the way for others interested in pursuing vision of fusing geomatics and game design to produce a serious game to teach children about gaming, tech- nology, and sustainability. The Energy Wars Mobile game allows discovery and exploration of environment and space through location-based and aug- mented reality tools. They also provide a fruitful insight in how the game and side-projects reflected their vision, and what the GeoEduc3d group has to say about network based science. The fourth perspective (Chapter 9) is from Julian Dodson, Normand Ber- geron, Patricia Johnston, Richard Hedger, Patrice Carbonneau and Michel Lapointe on the use of cutting edge geomatics tools for the measurement of fish habitat variables over long river segments. Their research applied these advances to the problem of understanding Atlantic salmon spatial behaviour and survival in relation to habitat characteristics. The major challenge GEOSALAR faced was the integration of spatial referencing techniques with data acquisition from heterogeneous sources, including landscape complexity, fish movements across the landscape and the impact of human activity on landscape complexity at different spatial and temporal scales. The chapter VII demonstrates how a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort can change the framework for enquiry in a given domain. Finally, the last perspective is based on a Local Climate Change Visioning process that has adapted geospatial tools to a range of contexts and thematic areas. In Chapter 10, Ellen Pond, Olaf Schroth, Stephen Sheppard, Rob Feick, Danielle Marceau, John Danahy, Sarah Burch, Laura Cornish, Stewart Cohen, Majeed