Data integration for tackling global environmental challenges - Plenary Session

 

 

 

 

Helen Glaves,  British Geological Survey, UK  & Marine Data Harmonisation IG

Abstract

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Helen Glaves is the Senior Data Scientist at the British Geological Survey (BGS) and directly responsible for the management of the BGS scientific data holdings to ensure delivery of high quality geoscience data and metadata to support the core science priorities of the organization. Helen is also co-ordinator of the Ocean Data Interoperability Platform (ODIP and ODIP2) projects, funded by the European Commission, National Science Foundation (USA) and the Australian Government, to support the development of a common global framework for marine data management. She is also currently involved with a number of other national and international initiatives directly related to the sharing, re-use and preservation of earth science data including ENVRIPLUS, SciDIP-ES and the Belmont Forum e-Infrastructure and Data Management initiative (http://www.bfe-inf.org/).

Wim Hugo, South African Environmental Observation Network, South Africa

 

 

The GEO BON Manifesto was developed and discussed at the GEO BON meeting in Asilomar II, December 2012. From an information technology perspective, the GEO BON Manifesto addresses description, discovery, assessment, access, analysis, and application or reporting, by stating that it is the interest of any specific community to do the following:

•        Ensure that scientific data and services are described properly, preserved properly, and discoverable;

◦          This implies availability of metadata standards, harvesters, brokers, and meta-data interoperability.

◦          Persistent identifiers implied.

◦          Protocols and standards for data exchange/ uploads are implied.

◦          Preservation standards and formats implied.

◦          Tools and approaches to make searches more efficient (vocabularies, ontologies, dealing with massive meta-data collections, …).

◦          Sustainable data centers and long-term archives are implied.

•        Once discovered, its utility, quality, and scope can be understood, even if the data sets are huge;

◦          Implies: Visualisations, feedback on quality, quality metrics and standards, viewing search results in relation to referenced spatial, temporal, and ontological/ taxonomic coverages, ability to dynamically extract 'thumbnail' views of large datasets, …

•        Once understood; it can be accessed freely and openly;

◦          Implies: standardised services, licenses and policies, simplified distribution channels, even if costs are involved, …

•        Once accessed, it can be included into distributed processes, and collated - preferably automatically, and on large scales (the ‘Model Web’);

◦          Implies: persistence of mash-ups and mediations, web context documents, web processing services, standards and guidelines for grid computing, ability to construct indicators and standardized, interoperable final products,  …

•        That due recognition is afforded to the creators of the data and services;

◦          Implies: data publication and citation, linking to scholarly articles, …

•        Once processed, the mediations defined, usefulness, and knowledge gathered can be re-used.

◦          Implies: defining and storing templates and examples of finished work, processes, mash-ups, context documents, … 

All of this needs to be implemented against the backdrop of

The push to extend formal meta-data with Linked Open Data;

The increased availability of crowd-sourced and citizen contributions;

A proliferation of devices and sensors;

And the construction of knowledge networks.

GEO BON Workgroup 8 is working towards addressing the gaps within this vision, largely by offering formally published guidance, and by engaging initiatives – including RDA -and programmes that can contribute. The standards and specifications landscape is reviewed in light of GEO-BON’s work on Essential Biodiversity Variables. Progress with this is discussed and summarized – defining the state of play in respect of end-to-end interoperability for biodiversity sciences.

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Wim has a master's degree in Chemical Engineering, and many years experience in techno-economic feasibility studies, management consulting, systems engineering and systems architecture. Recent work (5-6 years) has focused on systems architecture and development in support of scientific data management and preservation. Research interests include Knowledge Networks and Certification of Trusted Digital Repositories. Member of the ICSU-World Data System Scientific Committee, and co-chair of the GEO-BON WG8 (Systems and Architecture), and of the newly constituted collaboration between RDA and WDS on repositories. Active in CoDATA, GEO, and GEOSS.

Rebecca Koskela, Universiy of New Mexico, USA & Keith Jeffery - Keith Jeffery Consultants, UK & Metadata Standards Directory IG

The scope of biological and environmental research has been changing to focus on long-term, broad-scale, and complex questions that require diverse data collected by interdisciplinary science teams as well as different approaches for managing, preserving, analyzing, and sharing data. The RDA metadata groups focus on all aspects of metadata for research data, including data discovery, contextualization, validation, analytical processing, and interoperation. Metadata is not only important for documenting data (including rights, provenance as well as the usual descriptive information) and assessing datasets for relevance and quality (which includes dataset and publication citation) for the (re-)purpose in hand; it is also necessary for interoperation. This presentation will cover best practices for interoperable metadata useful for interdisciplinary research.

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Rebecca Koskela is the Executive Director of DataONE at the University of New Mexico. Prior to this position, Rebecca was the Life Sciences Informatics Manager for Alaska INBRE and the Biostatistics and Epidemiology Core Manager for the Center for Alaska Native Health Research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In addition to her bioinformatics experience, Rebecca has over 25 years experience in high performance computing including positions at Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cray Research and Intel.

Susanna Sansone, University of Oxford, UK & Technical Advisory Board & Biosharing Registry WG

Associate Director at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, consultant for Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Data, co-chair of the RDA-Force11 BioSharing WG and member of the RDA TAB. As Principal Investigator at the Centre, Susanna’s activities are around and in support of data curation, management and publication and their pivotal roles in enabling reproducible research, driving science and discoveries. Susanna focuses on life science, environmental and biomedical domains, collaborating with data producers and service providers, and pre-competitive informatics initiatives, journals and funding agencies to develop software and promote the creation and uptake of community-developed ontology and standards.

Nicky Nicolson, Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, UK & Biodiversity Data Integration IG

Scientific names are used in all domains as entry points into biodiversity datasets - but names are updated over time as we refine our understanding of species diversity. Resolution services are essential for data integration efforts to build the linked open data that researchers require: these allow navigation between old and new names as represented in different taxonomies (organising systems) and thus provide access to all content linked to name variants. Names services, operating on high-quality, expert-curated, structured, linked data representing names and their inter-relationships allow the transition of static text to actionable data. These services should be usable by any domain of basic or applied science dealing with scientific names of organisms.

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Nicky Nicolson is the senior research leader in the Kew’s Biodiversity Informatics team, and has over 15 years experience in biodiversity informatics – the effort to curate, mobilise and exploit global scale biodiversity data resources gathered over hundreds of years.