Presentations from the Mini Symposium on Sustainable Research Software Development for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation organized by ITC in collaboration with eScience Center in Enschede, The Netherlands on 17 November 2022.

Research software play important role in addressing real-world problems related to environment and society. They also become more complex with the availability of advanced computing methods and infrastructure, such as deep learning, big data analytics, and cloud computing. This is especially the case for the Earth Observation and Geo-information Science domains that need to deal with a wide variety of large spatio-temporal data. Moreover, best practices not only in software development but also community development are required to comply with Open Science and FAIR principles that are crucial for modern research. Research software development is essentially evolving into a team effort of professionals with different expertise and skills, including researchers, research software engineers, technology advisors, and community managers.  

The mini symposium aims to improve the collaboration between the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) and the Netherlands eScience Center on research software development by bringing the research and development communities of both institutions together to enable transfer of technical and practical know-how. 7 eScience Center and 10 ITC software were presented during the mini symposium, and the participants had to chance to network and discuss about the needs and challenges in the application of best practices for sustainable research software development in the field of geo-information science and Earth observation.

This event is supported by the Netherlands eScience Center Fellowship Grant NSESC.ESCF.2022.013.