The International conference on Geographic Information Science is a yearly conference organized by the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE) that brings together researchers, educators and practitioners in the broad field of geospatial data, its analysis and applications. This year’s edition took place in Dresden, Germany, from the 10^th of June until the 13^th of June and was particularly successful, with around 200 participants. At this occasion, UJI and ITC, both partners in the SpaceSuite project, disseminated and promote the project.

Firstly, SpaceSuite partners University of Twente (ITC) and Universidad Jaime I (UJI – GEOTEC) and Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg (PLUS) led a workshop titled “Education Connections for Tomorrow”. The workshop introduced the participants to the GeoSpace Body of Knowledge, highlighting its recent extensions towards the space downstream sector, and the SpaceSuite BoK platform and tools. During the first part of the workshop, the purpose and structure (a hierarchy of concepts) of the BoK were explained, and insights were shared on how the BoK concepts and their descriptions are created.  The second part of the workshop focused on the new educational tools currently under development in the SpaceSuite project. Particularly, participants could try out the Training Catalogue Tool, which allows to browse, find and visualize innovate training material in the space downstream sector. They annotated and created their own course entry, by using the tool to create its metadata. Next, the BoK Matching Tool was introduced as a flexible tool to compare and match BoK-based resources through their associated BoK concepts. The tool allows various degrees of matching (e.g., direct match, match via super/sub-concept relations) and allows, for example, to compare the participant’s knowledge and skills with those taught through course material, to compare different course materials or to compare a participant’s annotated CV with a job offer in the space downstream sector. Based on the results of these matchings, participants finally used the Curriculum Design Tool, either to design new course material fulfilling certain identified knowledge or skill needs, or to create a personalized learning path towards career development. Next to some lively discussions, the received feedback will be valuable input for next iterations of the Body of Knowledge and the associated tools.

Secondly, Rob Lemmens (ITC) and Carlos Granell (UJI) manned a SpaceSuite booth, which was permanently present during coffee breaks and poster sessions. Here, conference attendants could get information about the SPACE4GEO Large-scale Skills Partnership for the Space sector, the SpaceSuite project and the GeoSpace Body of Knowledge.

Finally, SpaceSuite partners ITC and UJI also presented an article, called “Knowledge extraction and footprint generation using the GeoSpace Body of Knowledge”, describing their work on using natural language processing to extract knowledge, in terms of BoK concepts, from scientific articles, and using this information to visualize so called knowledge footprints for the proceedings of the AGILE conference, for individual authors or for universities.