Building Spatial Knowledge Infrastructure

The author in the first part would like to share his experiences of a European Union sponsored LEONARDO da VINCI project – Land Information Management for Executives (LIME) co-ordinated by the College of Geoinformatics, University of West Hungary (GEO). The LIME outcomes were a knowledge resource centre and an Internet-supported distributed education service for the Hungarian Land Administration. LIME greatly improves the knowledge transfer in land administration in Hungary. The LIME project updated and enhanced the structure and developed a new short course in land information management, creating an EU conform new profession called “land information manager assistant”. Another development the NODE (Networked Open Distance Education) MINERVA project design started from a vision of educational resources available through distributed networks delivering learning media to individual learners. In order to provide a generic framework for the changing roles of educators and educational institutions a three-tiered system of content authors, educational gateways ('brokers') and points-of-learning has been conceived, with the latter institutions serving as interfaces with individual learners. Assuming that some of the traditional barriers between institutions will be broken down in favour of networks of interoperable learning objects, the NODE concept serves as a framework to improve access for individual learners and to redefine roles for networked educational institutions. The outcomes of NODE provided a set of perspectives, experiences and insights serving as starting points for further development of institutional strategies in educational markets. The second part of the paper is focusing on the functional design of an educational gateway.