The International Service for the Geoid (ISG, https://www.isgeoid.polimi.it/, last access: 31 March 2021) provides free access to a dedicated and comprehensive repository of geoid models through its website. In the archive, both the latest releases of the most important and well-known geoid models, as well as less recent or less known ones, are freely available, giving to the users a wide range of possible applications to perform analyses on the evolution of the geoid computation research field. The ISG is an official service of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG), under the umbrella of the International Gravity Field Service (IGFS). Its main tasks are collecting, analysing, and redistributing local, regional, and continental geoid models and providing technical support to people involved in geoid-related topics for both educational and research purposes. In the framework of its activities, the ISG performs research taking advantage of its archive and organizes seminars and specific training courses on geoid determination, supporting students and researchers in geodesy as well as distributing training material on the use of the most common algorithms for geoid estimation. This paper aims at describing the data and services, including the newly implemented DOI Service for geoid models (https://dataservices.gfz-potsdam.de/portal/?fq=subject:isg, last access: 31 March 2021), and showing the added value of the ISG archive of geoid models for the scientific community and technicians, like engineers and surveyors (https://www.isgeoid.polimi.it/Geoid/reg_list.html, last access: 31 March 2021).
Open Data, and Open Government Data, are proving to be an important resource for the economic development inside the domain where information has a key role (Carrara et al., 2015). Although, different practices for data publishing have led to misalignment, underuse and repetition of information (Bizer et al., 2011). For this reason, the Public Administrations have undergone efforts on integrating the information and promoting interoperability through the implementation of best practices, as for example, the use of a common semantics vocabulary for the metadata (DCAT) as proposed by the ISA2 programme of the European Commission. The Interreg Italy-Switzerland GIOCOnDA project has been proposed for enhancing the data sharing processes in the cross-border area, particularly addressing tourism and mobility that are key economic activities for the region. For this work, a review on the data catalogues published in dati.lombardia.it and opendata.swiss is presented. The revision of the datasets showed the need for: 1) defining common semantics for the description of the categories of data to avoid the arbitrary use of vocabularies, and 2) adopting standards for the description of geodata. On the other hand, it was observed the potential to gather existing information to produce geodata querying the datasets with specific keywords that can provide spatial information. Open data, as well as the use of best practices for publishing data, push towards the use of FOSS. In this work, Python has been exploited to analyse the content of the catalogues to access web portals resources.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become the global framework for evaluating the effectiveness of humanitarian projects. Humanitarian mapping is considered a popular voluntary geographic information technique that provides data for disaster response. Although humanitarian mapping has contributed significantly to the SDGs, there is a lack of in-depth studies on the state of this relationship. This paper aims to assess the potential relationship between the SDGs and humanitarian mapping by (1) analyzing SDG indicators to determine their potential contribution to humanitarian mapping, and (2) identifying the actual contribution of humanitarian mapping projects to the SDGs. To achieve this, the study uses a structured methodology that combines SDG indicator analysis with project-level data filtering and text mining. Three major humanitarian mapping platforms—HOT-TM, MapSwipe, and Ushahidi—are examined in order to capture their potential and actual contributions to the SDG framework. Ultimately, the study highlights the strong alignment between humanitarian mapping activities and the need to monitor the SDGs, particularly in water, urban infrastructure, and land use, emphasizing the potential of volunteer-driven geospatial data to address critical data gaps.