OpenPlanetary Data Café at EPSC 2017
At OpenPlanetary, our goal is to promote and facilitate the open practice of planetary science and data analysis for professionals and amateurs.
We do so by organizing events and conducting collaborative projects aimed at creating scientific, technical and educational resources, tools and data accessible to all.
This year we had the opportunity to organise our first Open Data Café at the European Planetary Science Conference 2017 in Riga, Latvia.
The idea for this Café was to invite both junior and senior scientists to share their expertise, tools, science use cases and issues. It was intended to be a participative workshop with hackathons and collaborative data handling and analysis components using state-of-the-art community-driven open source tools. We had prepared a rough agenda, along with some material, both available on our GitHub repository.
For a first edition, our workshop was surprisingly well attended. Up to 20 people came and participated in discussions around the addressed topics. Participants were coming from a diverse background in geology, cartography, spectroscopy, radio science, and computer science.
After an introduction to the OpenPlanetary community, framework and goals, Alessandro Frigeri gave a very interesting talk about licensing and making work material citable.
Nicolas Manaud presented the community-driven OpenPlanetaryMap project and went though a quick tutorial on how to make your own maps of Mars using CARTO and the current project’s resources (basemaps and datasets).
Mario d’Amore (kidpixo) gave us a nice introductory and comprehensive tutorial on “Machine Learning with Python Notebook”.
We are very satisfied with this first edition and grateful to the EPSC organising committee to have allowed us to run this new kind of splinter at such important planetary science conference.
We can only regret we didn’t have enough time to cover a roundtable discussion about common issues, and a suitable setup to run hands-on sessions on addressed topics.
We look forward to organise a next edition at EPSC 2018 in Berlin! In the meantime, feel free to share your feedback on what you would like to improve.
Many thanks to the participants!
