Recently approved by the EU Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA), EO4GEO is a new project fund under the Erasmus+ Programme.

As inferred by its full name – EO4GEO Towards and innovative strategy for skills development and capacity building in the space geo-information sector supporting Copernicus user uptake – this new Sector Skills Alliance* project is born under a key action developed for the New Skills Agenda communication form the EU Commission: a Blueprint for sectoral cooperation on skills**. It aims to help bridging the skills gap between supply and demand of education and training in the space/geospatial sector.

EO4GEO will last for 4 years as of the 1st of January 2018 and will be kicked-off on the 16th and 17th of January.

It gathers 26 partners and 22 initial associated partners, - among them is Planetek Italia -, drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds (academia, private and public sectors, etc.) and operating in complementary sectors (education/training, space/geospatial, etc.). Note also that most of the partners are members of the Copernicus Academy Network.

In order to reinforce the existing ecosystem and to foster the uptake and integration of space/geospatial data and services in end-users applications, EO4GEO will define a long-term and sustainable strategy taking into account the current and expected technological and non-technological developments in the concerned sectors.

Amongst the actions to be implemented in this context, one can mention:

• The creation and the regular update of an ontology-based body of knowledge for the space/geospatial sector;
• The development of a dynamic collaborative platform;
• The organisation of a series of training actions in three sub-sectors (integrated applications, smart cities and climate change) to test and validate the approach.

Read more here http://copernicus.eu/news/eo4geo-spacegeospatial-sector-skills-alliance