Project Open Source/Open Access (POSOA)

The University of Toronto's Project Open Source/Open Access (POSOA) has supported the development of some components of this site over 2009-2010, under the direction of Frances Garrett. In a 2009-10 POSOA-sponsored project entitled "OS/OA Geospatial Information Management for Collaborative Research Teams," University of Toronto undergraduate student Matt Zito contributed images of cultural sites in Xining. For this project, Zito studied the availability to humanities and social science research teams of OS/OA tools and methods for managing and organizing place-based information. Humanities and social science researchers, such as anthropologists, historians or religious studies scholars, often focus their research efforts on specific regions of the world. An increasing number of researchers in such fields work collaboratively with each other and with students on larger scale projects focused on particular geographic areas. Such researchers are rarely trained in Geographic Information Systems technologies and their research interests differ from those of GIS geographers, and yet they have many reasons for organizing their data geospatially. This project began as a case-study of how to integrate the geospatially-oriented research efforts of team members by testing and documenting a FOSS method for geotagging and geocoding research data (images, videos, texts) and organizing that collaboratively-generated dataset in an OS Geospatial Content Management System. This Geo-CMS was used by a team of researchers traveling and working in various regions of Eastern Tibet throughout 2009-2010, and it led to the development of the current site. Matt Zito's final report describes his experiences and includes a manual for practical use of a recommended field method.

For a 2010 POSOA-sponsored project entitled  “A Study of the Openness of GIS Datasets on China, and the Integration of Available Data in the OS/OA Tsongkha Valley Project,” University of Toronto undergraduate student Nicholas Field has expanded the GIS data available to the site, as the project was transformed from the Tsongkha Valley Project to Plateau Culture. Field has entered data about numerous geographic sites, and his final report will discuss the degree of openness found among available datasets about China.