Asia-Oceania GEOSS is a regional cooperation initiative with broad involvement to strengthen comprehensive ability of Earth observation and applications for sustainable development. AOGEOSS aims to establish the effective cooperation framework at regional level with broader participation, utilizing the resources and ability of countries in Asia-Oceania region to confront major challenges in the environment and society, such as natural disaster, environmental changes and sustainable development.

To promote AOGEOSS Initiative, a number of activities are planned to be held in the year of 2018, including international conference and training workshop on May, 2018 in China. It will be held with side meetings related to AOGEOSS TGs, in order to enhance the capacity building of participants, communicate the progress on selected efforts and really fleshout implementation activities.

International conference of AOGEOSS will provide a platform for participants to discuss the key issues to promote the implementation of Asia-Oceania regional GEOSS, exchange technical experiences, and share innovative solutions in their applicability in AO regions.

The training workshop will focus on knowledge spread and experience exchanging on certain domains in 2-day courses,in order to promote capacity building for access, analysis and application EO data in AO region, especially developing countries. The training course mainly consists of a series of lectures and practical exercises in some selected topics, not only introduce how to discover the EO data around the world, the key points involved in the idea, policy, methodology and new practices of data access, processing, and sharing; also include introduction of the show cases of regional concerns, discussion and practical exercises on data applications.

Side meetings could have some in-depth discussion within the experts as pre-event of the International conference, and their outputs could be shared in the plenary session. We would like to leave the day ahead of the conference for each session of the International conference to hold their side meetings. It has opened up application to the session co-chairs who are interested in organizing it.