With the creation of a Map of SDI Education in Europe, the SPIDER project aims to explore and describe the current landscape of academic SDI Education in Europe. For the preparation of this Map, information on existing courses on Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and related topics was collected from online course descriptions of European higher education institutions.
A course is considered to be SDI-related in case Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) or a key component of SDIs are one of the main subjects of the course. Examples of key components of SDIs are geospatial standards, networks services, data models, metadata, GI/SDI legislation, GI/SDI policies, access mechanisms, technologies for setting up SDIs, SDI assessment, etc.
The current version of the Map of SDI Education contains 126 SDI-courses, from 63 different higher education institutions in Europe. The Map will be regularly updated and various analyses will be carried out to better understand the current offer of SDI education, in terms of its content, learning objectives and applied teaching methods. The methodology for creating the Map and a first analysis of the identified courses are presented in the SPIDER-report ‘Mapping of SDI Education in Europe’. Proposals for new courses to be included in the Map can be sent to the project team.