Visiting Scientist Final Report Summary

A frustrating and highly irritating year at Ispra but a very productive and enjoyable time working with the Open GIS Consortium (OGC).

I was elected to chair the OGC Feature Identity and Relationships Working Group and we have gone from a large degree of confusion to having complete first drafts of abstract specifications and a draft "request for proposals" which will lead to new Open GIS standards.

I devised, prepared and presented 6 seminars at JRC Ispra, gave numerous presentations at OGC Technical Committee meetings and contributed substantially to email discussion groups on European GIS strategic policy. I wrote a study paper on federated database architectures for the Unit in which I was working. I wrote many OGC technical documents and a paper on feature identity which has been submitted to Interop'99 (Zurich). I attended Interop'97 (Santa Barbara) and the first AGILE conference (Enschede).

Final impressions:

• It is apparent that the Visiting Scientist programme is failing in its original aims.
• The uselessness of the Human Resources Unit in failing to help sort out ordinary tax and social security issues is beyond belief: I had to resort to the European Ombudsman to discover my social security status.
• I did not expect that the agreed formal statement of work, signed by the Director of the Institute, would be entirely ignored.
• I was appalled at the level of corrupt "science" in the JRC: projects with no validity which were continued for political reasons.

Dr. Philip Sargent
27 Greville Road
Cambridge CB1 3QJ
ENGLAND

Philip.Sargent@computer.org
http://www.bigfoot.com/~philip.sargent/

Philip Sargent (C) Copyright 1998.

This is the summary from the final report (zipped Word97 document, 228kB) of Philip Sargent who was a visiting scientist at the Space Applications Institute, Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy between 1^st December 1997 and 30^th November 1998.