The GEO-VIII Plenary was hosted in Istanbul by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) on Nov. 16-17. The nearly 400 participants reviewed recent progress on implementing GEOSS, accepted the new 2012-2015 Work Plan and its associated management structure, welcomed the Global Forest Observation InitiativeGEO Global Agriculture Monitoring initiative (GEO GLAM), established a Working Group to consider how GEO and GEOSS should develop beyond the year 2015, and agreed how to further advance the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) and GEOSS Data-CORE (Collection of Resources for Everyone).

Making Progress

The 2009-2011 Work Plan Progress Report highlighted three main trends: Many new products and services are now available via GEOSS, data sharing and the capacity for accessing and using data continue to grow, and there is increased support for user engagement.

Noteworthy progress has been made by the Supersites and National Laboratories initiative on geologically active regions, the GEONETCast network of satellite-based data dissemination systems, an improved global topographical map, and a new warning systems for wildland fire.

Further, progress has been made on multi-model products for extreme-weather prediction, forest carbon tracking, new tools for land-cover maps, improved ecosystem classification and mapping, the Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), the China Brazil Earth Resources Satellite program (CBERS), the Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM), and GEO GLAM.

GEOSS Common Infrastructure and Data-CORE

In an effort to accelerate improvements to the GCI, the Architecture and Data Committee led a “Sprint to Plenary” in the run-up to GEO-VIII. Key actions included adopting new technologies for search and discovery, proactively approaching data holders, executing technical enhancements to improve functionality and outcomes, simplifying the registration process for data providers, and proactively identifying potential Data-CORE resources.

Work will continue over the coming months on improving the user experience, improving functionality, and ensuring easier access to global resources. GEO Members and Participating Organizations are urged to contribute to this ongoing effort by improving access to their own data resources.

Thanks to the “Sprint,” the GCI (which consists of a portal, clearinghouse and registries) is starting to play its role as a central hub for the discovery and sharing of data and systems. Today, more than 28 million data products are discoverable via the GCI.

This rapid growth is due to the introduction of the EuroGEOSS brokerage software, which allows the GCI to talk to external catalogues containing an enormous number of resources. The user sends a request to the GCI, which is then transmitted through the broker to these catalogues. Because different catalogues use different keywords (e.g. rainfall vs. precipitation), a controlled vocabulary – the GEOSS Earth observation vocabulary – has been established by combining existing and well-established dictionaries and glossaries.

The User Interface Committee’s report on Critical Earth Observation Priorities has proven useful for determining whether the discoverable datasets meet user needs. Of the top 25 most important parameters, the committee has determined that 23 are covered by the GCI, as are 111 of the 146 critical Earth observation parameters. Next steps are to advance the GCI’s capability from simple discovery to enable access and exploitation. In addition, a communication plan will be created and implemented.

Parallel to the “Sprint to Plenary,” over the past year the Data Sharing Task Force has worked on promoting contributions to the Data-CORE, identified existing licensing options consistent with CORE requirements, and addressed other issues such as user registration and legal liability. The GEOSS Data-CORE now provides full and open access to more than 120 datasets with thousands of resources. The promotion of data sharing will continue under the 2012-2015 Work Plan, through a new Task under the responsibility of a Data Sharing Working Group.

The 2012-2015 Work Plan

The number of Tasks in the 2012-2015 Work Plan has been streamlined from 42 to 26. They have been organized into the three parts: Infrastructure, Institutions and Development, and Information for Societal Benefits.

Under the new Work Plan management structure, the three parts will each be supported by an Implementation Board, while each Task will be implemented by a Task team consisting of all the co-leads and contributors supported by a Task coordinator. Task teams will have direct responsibility for the best-efforts management, execution and coordination of the underlying Task components.

Coordination across Tasks will be supported by the Implementation Boards and the GEO Secretariat, and coordination within Tasks will be supported by the Task teams, Communities of Practice and Secretariat. The existing Committees will be disbanded and their roles transferred to the Task teams and the Implementation Boards.

New Initiatives

The Plenary meeting accepted (with some amendments) the Implementation Plan for the Global Forest Observation Initiative (GFOI). The GFOI has its roots in the Forest Carbon Tracking Task, which focuses on scientific and demonstration activities.

The initiative will support long-term observation needs and engage with key users, notably the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). GFOI is underpinned by an observations strategy developed by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS). The Implementation Plan calls for a phased approach, with a start-up phase in 2012, the commencement of operations in 2013, and full operations in 2014.

The Plenary also welcomed the new GEO Global Agriculture Monitoring initiative (GEO GLAM). GEO GLAM responds to the concerns of the Group of 20 about food price volatility and the need for large investments in agriculture during the next 20 years. Both GEO GLAM and the FAO’s Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS), to which GEO GLAM can contribute, are applauded in the recent final declaration of the G20 Heads of State.

GEO GLAM will help to build national capacities for agricultural monitoring; strengthen, harmonize and connect global and regional agricultural systems; and develop an operational global Earth observation system of systems for agricultural monitoring. Long-term commitments and open-data policies will be vital to its success.

Next Year and Beyond

Brazil will host the GEO-IX Plenary in late 2012. The meeting is planned for the city of Foz de Iguazu.

Looking further ahead, the Plenary endorsed the establishment of a Post-2015 Working Group. This Working Group will consider how GEO and GEOSS should evolve after the conclusion of the 10-Year GEOSS Implementation Plan in 2015. The Group has been tasked with preparing a proposal for the Ministerial Summit and GEO-X Plenary meeting to be held in late 2013.

Michael Williams is external relations manager for GEO in Geneva, Switzerland.

Image Source: EuroGEOSS 2012 conference website.

The event will focus on facilitating and demonstrating multi-disciplinary solutions to environmental issues facing humanity.

The challenge for addressing issues such as climate change, food security or ecosystem sustainability is that they require cross-discipline collaboration and the ability to integrate information across scientific domains, according to news release.

These collaborations are difficult because each discipline has its own “language,” protocols and formats for communicating within its community and handling data and information.

A list of keynote speakers includes:

Gilberto Camara, a researcher on Geoinformatics and Environmental Modelling at the Image Processing Division of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research;

Ivan DeLoatch, executive director of the U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee;

Ian Jackson, a member of the OneGeology Executive at the British Geological Survey.

The EuroGEOSS 2012 conference is due to include applications presentations as well as information technology.

A post-conference special edition is planned of International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research.

The deadline for journal submissions is Feb. 15.

The seminar will focus on the benefits of improved decision-making on local and global scales. The event will last about an hour, with time for questions at the end. It will be presented by Steffen Fritz, Sabine Fuss and Ian McCallum.

The seminar is divided in 4 parts:

• An overview of current methods and tools for socio-economic benefit assessment studies of Earth observation;
• How ordinary citizens interested in Earth observation and land cover can help reduce uncertainties in global land cover and contribute to the discussion on the biofuel debate;
• How the benefit of reducing uncertainties can be accessed within the context of policy-making;
• A systems dynamics model built to analyze the benefit of the Global Earth Observation System of System (GEOSS) in the EuroGEOSS specific themes of forest, droughts and biodiversity.

This is the first in a series of lectures on developments in Earth Observation sponsored by The European Commission-funded EuroGEOSS project.

Download EuroGEOSS Web Seminar PDF here.

A workshop on the socio-economic benefits of GEO-GEOSS is planned for July 11-13 at the Joint Research Center in Ispra Italy. The purpose of the workshop is to identify a program of activities to undertake during 2011-15 to support the development of capabilities internationally to determine, quantify and document, the socioeconomic benefits from Earth observations and their use, including the benefits that can and will be achieved by GEO and other international bodies.

Such program of activities may include the consolidation of dispersed bodies of literature relevant to the assessment of impacts and benefits of geographic information/earth observation, the evaluation of different methodologies appropriate to undertake such assessments, the gathering of evidence of impacts/benefits in different user communities and societal benefits areas, and outreach activities to develop shared understanding across disciplinary boundaries on value and methods of assessment.

The number of workshop participants is expected to be 25 with focus on practitioners of benefit/impact assessments and related fields. Experts in physical, social and economic sciences are invited to attend. The workshop is being organized by JRC, NASA, IIASA and IEEE. Please contact Dr. Max Craglia (massimo.craglia@jrc.ec.europa.eu), Dr. Jay Pearlman (jay.pearlman@ieee.org), Dr. Steffen Fritz (fritz@iiasa.ac.at) or Dr. Lawrence Friedl (lfriedl@nasa.gov) for further information. If you are interested in attending, please forward an expression of interest via email to the organizers and include your area of expertise and a CV. The deadline for letters of interest is June 21, 2011.

Who is Max Craglia? Massimo (Max) Craglia is a senior scientist in the Unit of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission that has the responsibility for the technical development of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe. Within the Unit, he is responsible for the development of the INSPIRE Implementing Rules for Metadata, and for research on the impact assessment of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) and INSPIRE. He also is the technical coordinator of EuroGEOSS project, an Integrated Project developing INSPIRE-compliant GEOSS Operating Capacity in three thematic areas: Drought, Biodiversity/Protected Areas, and Forestry. In addition, Max is one of the founders of the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science and the editor of the International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research. Prior to joining the JRC in 2005, Max was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, teaching GIS for urban planners, and researching areas of spatial data infrastructure deployment, use, and data policy. Max holds a degree in Civil Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, Italy; a MPhil in Urban & Regional Planning from the University of Edinburgh; and a PhD in GIS and Planning from the University of Sheffield. His books include “GIS and Evidence-Based Policy Making,” with Steve Wise, “GIS in Public Health Practice” with Ravi Maheswaran, “Geographic Information Research: Transatlantic Perspectives” with H. Onsrud and “Geographic Information Research: Bridging The Atlantic” with H. Couclelis.

The first step in making sense of the processes and events that impact the Earth is to observe and analyze them. The next step is to share those observations and analyses with your peers in the context of a shared infrastructure. Today, however, there are dozens of such shared infrastructures, each with its own set of policies, terms and protocols. The content is written in dozens of languages, and may cover the same ground multiple times. As Dr. Massimo (Max) Craglia, technical coordinator of the EuroGEOSS project, explains:

“Over the last 15 years, there have been a lot of developments worldwide to develop infrastructures to share spatial and environmental data. These have been mainly government led, and focused on research and policy. The problem we faced in Europe was that these different infrastructures did not use the same technical protocols, and therefore could not communicate across borders. Moreover, their content was in different languages (23 in the European Union alone), and major semantic differences existed across disciplines.”

One answer to this complex situation is the creation of The Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE). INSPIRE is a European directive, adopted in 2007, and in the process of being implemented. The INSPIRE legislation obliges all nations in the European Union to “ensure that the spatial data infrastructures of the Member States are compatible and usable in a community and transboundary context.”

INSPIRE provides a series of technical guidelines and specifications to ensure that all European spatial data infrastructures work together. The Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Commission (EC) is the Technical Coordinator of this activity, but other directorates also are involved.  The European Directorate-General for the Environment is leading the policy aspects, since INSPIRE addresses mainly environmental issues, while Eurostat will run the operational components. According to the INSPIRE website, the key principles of INSPIRE are that:

• Data should be collected only once and kept where it can be maintained most effectively;
• It should be possible to combine seamless spatial information from different sources across Europe and share it with many users and applications;
• It should be possible for information collected at one level/scale to be shared with all levels/scales; detailed for thorough investigations, general for strategic purposes;
• Geographic information needed for good governance at all levels should be readily and transparently available;
• It should be easy to find what geographic information is available, how it can be used to meet a particular need, and under which conditions it can be acquired and used.

INSPIRE is an important European contribution to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems. Other contributions from Europe include the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security initiative, and dedicated research projects. This is where EuroGEOSS comes in.

EuroGEOSS, funded by the European Union Framework Programme for Research & Development, is a three-year project intended to advance the state of the art of infrastructures like INSPIRE.

Illustration of Brokering Framework. Source: EuroGEOSS

Says Dr. Craglia: “EuroGEOSS involves access to data, but it also says ‘yes, data is important – but more important is what you do with the data afterwards.’ If you are trying to address complex issues like climate change or impact of society on the environment and vice versa, you must analyze, build models, make forecasts.

“In this project, we are trying to move beyond access to data, and make sure specialists describe what they do with the data to address different questions. All the knowledge experts have in their heads through their training is brought out into the open, formalized, and published so that the models that people would ordinarily create in their offices are also available to the wider scientific community. We are trying to create an environment in which scientists in different specialties can collaborate with a shared perspective to address different chunks of a problem.”

Craglia notes that collaboration is difficult, especially when it crosses both disciplines and language barriers. Thus, the challenge of EuroGEOSS is to develop tools to bridge traditional chasms between and among scientific communities.
The EC and JRC already have information systems that relate to drought, forestry and biodiversity, and so those three themes were selected as a focus for EuroGEOSS in its first three years.

Specifically, for example, “Biodiversity” addresses national parks in Africa because the EU is a major donor of aid in Africa, so there’s a policy demand to develop priorities for where to put the money.

Drought and Forest have a more European focus but they also are contributing to global initiatives. By focusing on specific areas of interest, EuroGEOSS can create a template that includes linkages across multiple systems so they can work together as one; not only accessing data but also providing models, forecasts, and possible scenarios. Once the templates are complete, it will become possible to expand the model to other thematic areas.

How is it possible to share information across disciplines, languages and infrastructure? The answer, now actively in use through EuroGEOSS, is a “brokering framework.” According to the EuroGEOSS website, “The EuroGEOSS Broker is able to interface with the web services in each of the three thematic areas, regardless of the different standards they use. In practical terms, the broker takes a request from a user as an entry, translates and dispatches it between the referenced services. In return, it merges and displays the results from the services.”

Says Dr. Craglia, “To develop the broker, you need to go out into different scientific communities and find out what is important to them, and how they address a problem. To do that, you need to sit, for example, with someone responsible for creating a map of forested areas in Europe and ask, “how do you do it?”

The likely response will be, Craglia says, “I create a map of an area that’s forested.” But then the question must be asked, “What do you mean by forest?” Unfortunately, the answer to that question is as varied as the people involved.

For example, “A forest can have no trees at all in England, as the term was used for the hunting reserves of kings. So there are English ’forests‘ with no trees. You can find definitions of forest that run for hundreds of pages. In some of the work we do, we adopt for example the definition of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), because you can’t cater for all definitions of forest — but you must make explicit which one you’re adopting for a particular application, what you do to reach an answer to a particular question. The key is that you are comparing apples to apples.”

Next, “You go through the process that each specialist goes through; you describe the process in language or in a more formal way. There are formal languages (such as the Business Processes Modeling Notation or BPMN) that allow- formal description of the process. Then you refine the process further into the work flow. Eventually, you can make the workflow executable by computers and thus create a service that’s published on the web.”

The EuroGEOSS Broker is a breakthrough in multi-disciplinary, international collaboration. It’s also, says Craglia, a “huge paradigm shift. If you’re a specialist you do all your work on the computer on your own; if you make the process more open and explicit, and run it on the web, potentially millions of people can use it and understand the science better.” The program is already available on the web, and is in use by investigators in specific fields of environmental research.

While the process of developing the Broker is time-consuming and complex, says Craglia, it’s working. “One proof of the pudding is that we are halfway through the project and the work we’ve developed has been recognized as so useful that we’re asked to contribute to a demonstration for the next GEOSS plenary.

“The architecture we’ve put in place is essentially based on acknowledging the differences in different disciplines. Through the work we’ve done we’ve realized that disciplines have different professional languages, styles, standards, and ways of collecting and sharing information. There are good reasons for the differences, so if you want to bring them together you can’t force them into a single template. You can’t be a dictator. People will say ‘no thanks.’ Instead, you build bridges. You learn to listen and understand what people do. You build technology that provides connections among different standards and information systems so they can communicate.”

According to the EuroGEOSS site, “The development for interoperability in EuroGEOSS has three phases: Interoperability within domains – across regional and national data bases; interoperability between the three focus domains of the project; and broad interoperability across the nine societal benefit areas of GEOSS. The EuroGEOSS project ends in April 2012, but another project will continue its work addressing the areas of Weather, Oceans, and Water (GEOWOW).

This essay is the last of a three-part series about the role of the Internet and Internet-based geoprocessing standards in the “opening up” of the geosciences. The first¹essay listed reasons for open publication of geoscience data. The second² described institutional commitment to open data, obstacles to achieving the goal, and technical standards that make the goal practical, and indeed, inevitable. This final essay looks at opportunities for geoscience stakeholders as science evolves in response to the evolution of information technology.

What Earth science “wants”

In his recent book, What Technology Wants³, Kevin Kelly asserts that technology is part of the same mega-phenomenon of emergent order and increasing variety that gave rise to life. After reviewing technology’s history, costs and risks, he says, “Yes, technology is acquiring its own autonomy and will increasingly maximize its own agenda, but this agenda includes — as its foremost consequence — maximizing possibilities for us.”

The institutions and norms of science provide opportunities for scientists in a system of incentives that satisfy their scientific and personal desires well enough to keep science viable in the near term. The institutions and norms, however, are under pressure to evolve. Part of this pressure is the fact that young people entering the geoscience work force relate to information technology in new ways and this technology is advancing at an ever-increasing pace.

Academia and the scientific community both shape and are shaped by media. One hundred years ago, geoscientists did field work, wrote papers on real paper, used mail, and had face-to-face meetings. Research progressed at a fairly methodical pace, often with little interaction between researchers in distance-separated geographic locations. Today, geoscientists use communication tools unthought of 50 years ago, enabling them to very rapidly network and interact with international colleagues and to access massive amounts of information, data and computing power. Such changes have accelerated progress in the Earth sciences and are beginning to open up new opportunities for institutions and individuals. Scientific publishers, for example, have opportunities to curate and publish data, and scientists potentially have more opportunities to be part of teams and communities that let each person make the most of their talents.

Today the Web, which at its root is a set of standards built on top of Internet standards, drives opportunity proliferation: Keyword searches, hyperlinking, tagging, geotagging, social networks, wikis, tweets, portals, web mapping, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, volunteered geographic information and smart phones all present opportunities for scientists. All depend on standards to provide universal access, data sharing and improved communication, and all present both risks and opportunities for institutions. Spawning unwieldy variety, emergent order shakes up old order.

For opportunities in the Earth sciences, what is particularly important are the geospatial standards that support access, sharing and improved communication of data and information referenced to Earth coordinate systems. Every Earth science community can benefit from a common “language” for expressing location, Earth feature properties and semantics, geoprocessing queries and responses, and sensor descriptions and data. New consensus-derived open standards developed by the global membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium⁴ (OGC) provide the foundation. OGC working groups are developing other standards that will address such things as communication of data provenance and quality, linking of information systems for natural and built environments, and location tagging of simple Short Message Service (SMS) messages.

Science wants to create and connect facts to create knowledge, and to connect bits of knowledge to create greater knowledge⁵. These functions depend on communication, so new, more powerful media based on new communication standards help science achieve its goals.

Internet disrupts, institutions resist

In science as in other domains, such as news reporting, the Internet is radically disruptive to old business models and incentive structures. The scientific paper selection and peer review process has become marginally faster with digital communications, but researchers effectively embargo their data both before and after publication. The publication of data is potentially easy and obviously useful (see the two previous articles in this series), so it ought to be the norm, but in practice new structures are needed to deal with rights, attribution, distribution, reputation, responsibilities and payment, and it takes time for such structures to form. To some, it seems that the integrity of science is at risk. To others, it seems that science is moving much too slowly into an era of greater integrity, effectiveness and growth.

With every disruptive technology, something is lost but something is gained (consider Socrates’ disdain for writing). Whether you share Kelly’s techno-optimism or not, the Internet challenge is unavoidable and we must look for answers to the question, “How can the institutions and practices of science be reshaped, not only to keep science viable but also to take science to a new level of integrity and effectiveness in an environment of new and ubiquitous information technologies?” Kelly, who carefully considers neo-Luddite fears and who speaks of our technologies as our children, would be the first to add, “How can we train the new information technologies to better serve science?”

Science co-evolves with society

Three “RSA Animate” animated talks prepared by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) relate to the subject of open science:

Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us⁶

The Empathic Civilization⁷

Changing Education Paradigms⁸

Here is my short summary of the talks: Sound behavioral science shows that current mainstream systems of education and worker motivation, which are rooted in outdated worldviews and economic relations, are surprisingly inefficient. What people actually respond to are increased opportunities for autonomy, mastery, purpose and selective collaboration. Most institutions discount these motivations, resulting in a deplorable global waste of human potential. On the positive side with respect to sustainability, each step in the progress of information technology has expanded the social sphere in which empathy motivates and binds us, and thus the hopeful prospect is that the Internet will ultimately extend our feelings of empathy to the biosphere.

With the prospect of active, science-based redesign of motivational systems and ongoing passive “massage” by new media (Marshall McLuhan’s pun⁹), we have some reason to hope that the institutions and practices of science will evolve to offer scientists more opportunities for autonomy, mastery, purpose and selective collaboration. In contrast to old media, which support hierarchical organization and conformity, new media encourage individuation and the emergence of new roles, so we can expect these opportunities to be matched to individuals’ unique motivational profiles. We can reasonably expect growth in creative uses of the Internet to accelerate science, science awareness, and science education.

The details of the new paradigm are, however, unclear. Peer review, for example, is a time-honored tradition in which the peers’ review of data has traditionally been deemed sufficient. How will peer review evolve to accommodate media that make possible much wider examination and reuse of data? The answer is not obvious. Recognizing and acting on new opportunities requires imagination and courage. While the new paradigm may be inevitable, it does not displace the old paradigm except as innovators give it shape.

New roles

The innovators shaping the new paradigm are creating new roles in science.

Part of both Kelly’s story and the RSA’s story is that discovery and invention are almost never the product of a lone genius; instead, each discovery and invention is an inevitable advance that emerges from an environment of ripening conditions. Kelly provides many examples of near-simultaneous completion of essentially identical studies and patents and compares this phenomenon to convergent evolution, the independent appearance in different life forms of, for example, similar wings or eyes. RSA describes the brain science involved in empathy and emulation, which are core elements of collaboration. The speaker in the “Changing Education Paradigms” animation states that most great learning happens in groups.

Thanks to the Web, the “ripening conditions” in any field of investigation evolve more rapidly and are felt more widely than before, and the Web reveals more opportunities for collaboration while also facilitating collaboration. The Web opens up new channels and removes obstacles to information sharing.

Science remains, of course, a highly competitive activity. New modes of partnering and sharing must evolve in an environment in which scientists continue to compete to build professional reputation by publishing findings in prestigious journals, ahead of others doing similar work. Competition will, in fact, probably intensify as innovators turn new media to advantage. This tension will shape the new paradigm. Just as businesses have been finding advantage in “coopetition”, scientists and teams of scientists will find new opportunities for advancement through collaboration. Similarly, life forms compete, but they also depend on each other. Just as maturing ecosystems are characterized by increasing numbers of interdependencies, people pursuing careers in science will create and discover new professional niches. To compete more effectively, scientists will, for example, increasingly seek help in writing grants and papers, developing data models and processing alogrithms, and setting up Web service based processing models. Social networks will help science professionals – not just scientists — join or form teams with unique constellations of creative and practical minds adapted to particular situations.

Cameron Neylon, an open science proponent, offered this sequence of research cycle diagrams in a presentation¹⁰ at a NESTA – Science in Society conference in 2009:

To describe these figures, one might say that open science adds porosity to steps in the research cycle. The outflows of data and information from the steps in one research cycle become inflows to steps in others’ research cycles.

Much of the projected sharing in this more open research process will be, by the nature of the Web, passive and informal, like sharing in open source software development. Lakhani and Hipple found that open source software developers benefit from their free work mainly through the learning gained by browsing through the problems and solutions posed by other developers¹¹.

In the same way that the Web gave rise to phenomena like Facebook and Twitter, such sharing will lead to new roles, new specialization, and new careers and businesses in science. Many Web innovations arise where there is widespread though little recognized need for a new communication channel. In open science, there are already business innovations seeking success in such market niches. For example:

• A small Australian start-up company called Kaggle is exploiting the concept of “crowdsourcing” in a novel way. Kaggle’s core idea is to facilitate the analysis of data by allowing outsiders to model it. To do that, the company organizes competitions in which anyone with a passion for data analysis can battle it out.

• InnoCentive is a website “where organizations—corporations, large and small, not-for-profits and governments—turn when they have important problems that need solving.”¹³

Some new niches appear inside established institutions. The OGC has seen the rise of scientific domain working groups, such as the Hydrology Domain Working Group and the Meteorology and Oceans Domain Working Group, in which scientists and science application specialists focus on application schemas and profiles of OGC standards and best practices for using the standards. Such work elaborates on long-standing data modeling efforts in those disciplines. There are opportunities for such activities in all of the geosciences, because all require in-discipline and inter-discipline semantic interoperability.

While advances such as cloud computing reduce the need for scientists and research programs to spend time and money on systems and systems administration, the growing importance of standards increases the need for people who understand technical, semantic and institutional (cultural and political) interoperability in the context of specific research domains. Likewise, while the transition from file-based data processing to Web service-based data processing reduces the need for scientists to understand and manipulate data formats, the transition to Web-accessible open data and services increases the need for data curators and specialists in topics such as scientific workflow, model interoperability, metadata, data provenance, uncertainty and data rights management.

As geoscientists and GIS professors age they will find themselves increasingly surrounded by younger colleagues who have different titles and who are focused on preparing students to be specialist members of science teams.

Conclusion

In his presentation, Neylon offers these words of advice to those who seek to advance open science: “Make your work available, let others build on it, to increase your impact. Be clear about what you want and expect, and give that information in context. Build your network. It’s your most valuable asset.”

This advice has been applicable since the earliest days of the grand consensus process we call science. The difference is that now there are fewer constraints. New social media enrich our possibilities for networking and discovery. Talent will rise more quickly now, and talented people will more quickly find each other to create outstanding teams. Mentors, collaborators and assistants will be found more easily. Less time and talent will be wasted. Ideas will mature more quickly and will be shared globally.

Because all the geosciences focus on the same Earth, and because our civilization’s survival depends on critical interdisciplinary geosciences such as ecology and climate science, it is geoscientists and their institutional partners who should be paying the most attention to open science. One essential enabler of open science and associated new opportunities in science will be open standards that enable fluid publishing, discovery, assessment, access and use of data, sensors and processing services. The Board, members and staff of the OGC encourage members of the geoscience community to learn more about these standards.

¹ http://www.earthzine.org/2010/08/04/18-reasons-for-open-publication-of-geoscience-data/
² http://www.earthzine.org/2011/02/02/geospatial-standards-opening-up-the-geosciences/
³ “What Technology Wants” Kevin Kelly. Penguin Group. 2010. Page 352.
⁴ http://www.opengeospatial.org
⁵ Kelly p 335
⁶ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel
⁷ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo&feature=channel
⁸ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
⁹ “The Medium is the Massage.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
¹⁰ Cameron Neylon presentation http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/nesta-science-in-society, NESTA – Science in Society conference in 2009, slides 30-32
¹¹ Lakhani, K., & von Hippel, E. (2003). How Open Source Software Works: “Free” User-to-User Assistance. Research Policy, 32, 923-943.
¹² Science 11 February 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6018 pp. 698-699, “May the Best Analyst Win,” by Jennifer Carpenter.
¹³ http://www2.innocentive.com/

GEO’s Tohoku-oki Event Supersite is pooling the best and most up-to-date images, maps, model results and links on the multiple disasters. The available products address interplate coupling, historic seismicity, and damage; they also include 3D animations of the aftershocks recorded to date.

JAXA has invited modelers and other users of the data it is distributing to share their results with Japan and with the international community as a whole. The agency has also issued a request for available information on the tsunami area, landslide area, deformation pattern (InSAR), future possible dangerous areas, and floating objects in the ocean.

ASI, together with the Italian Department of Civil Protection, is acquiring COSMO-Skymed data and Earth observation data elaborations on the earthquake scenario. It has elaborated maps of the tsunami covered area as well as maps on change, risk, vulnerability, and damage, and it is analyzing deformation patterns using COSMO-SkyMed pre- and post- seismic acquisitions.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) and other space agencies are continuing to provide imagery and data via the International Charter. The GEO community will remain committed to supporting the efforts of Japan to assess and respond to the tragic disasters it continues to face.

Reprinted with permission from GEO.

The Evaluation Team — with members from Canada, Norway, Germany, the United States, Italy, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Brazil and Pakistan — is assessing the implementation of GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) in the area of Architecture and Data Management. With your involvement, the online survey will provide a primary source of information.

To take the survey, see this link.

The survey will take 10-25 minutes of your time, depending on your level of involvement with GEOSS.

The survey results will be included in a report from the Evaluation Team, which will be forwarded to the GEO Monitoring and Evaluation Working Group for their review, followed by the GEO Executive Committee.

Cumulous cloud. Courtesy of Fotolia.

Lance McKee
Senior Staff Writer
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
+1 508-752-0108
lmckee@opengeospatial.org

This essay is a follow-on to my essay in the August 2010 issue of Earthzine, “18 Reasons for Open Publication of Geoscience Data.“¹ The premise of both is that science can be made more transparent and true to its principles through better use of Information Technology (IT) and a global infrastructure of technical standards that make it easy to publish, discover, assess and access data. This essay argues that in the geosciences, the necessary institutional commitment and technical standards are largely in place, but the standards’ availability and usefulness are not yet well known. As science fiction author William Gibson observed, “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”

Evidence Of Institutional Commitment

In the 24 August 2010 issue of EOS², in “Data Citation and Peer Review,” authors Parsons, Duerr and Minster argue that, “The scientific method and the credibility of science rely on full transparency and explicit references to both methods and data.”

Looking back a year, we see that the Geological Society of America (GSA), in its Open Data Access Position Statement³, adopted May 2005 and revised May 2009, “Strongly supports open access to scientific data by all purveyors of such data to promote advancement in research, support education, and improve the economic progress, health, and welfare of society.”

Eight years ago, the US National Academies’ 2002 “Geoscience Data and Collections: National Resources in Peril (2002)⁴” referenced the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences (EAR) “Guidelines for Geoscience Data and Collections Preservation and Distribution,” whose “overall purpose and fundamental objective … is to ensure and facilitate full and open access to quality data for research and education in the Earth Sciences. These guidelines are considered to be a binding condition on all EAR-supported projects.”

We see from these examples that there has been an ongoing call for and official commitment to open publication of geoscience data. Progress is evident in programs like the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and OneGeology, through which national government agencies are beginning to share their data more openly. The EOS article cited above noted other efforts. Progress is also evident in the number of papers on this general subject that were presented at the recent IGARSS 2010 conference.⁵

The ocean observation community uses OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards.

Despite all of this, however, data created for most geoscience studies are unavailable, and most of the data that are available are difficult to find and use. In science as in other domains such as government, geospatial data are hard to discover and access for a number of reasons.⁶ Scientists and governments are still creating data in idiosyncratic and often complex data formats. Data have been and continue to be created in software-specific files and there is no guarantee that proprietary databases and database models will be maintained. Metadata, when provided, may be in non-standard schemas and may neglect important elements such as data dictionaries. Some obstacles are new: In the emerging world of service-oriented IT architectures, web-service derived results are ephemeral and typically lack any record of provenance, including service history. (Open standards for tracking geospatial data provenance in a Web services environment do not yet exist.)

To repeat from Parsons, Duerr and Minster: “The scientific method and the credibility of science rely on full transparency and explicit references to both methods and data.” “Climategate,” as well as the simple fact that most geoscience data are not available, suggest that, frustrated by the difficulties summarized above, scientists and the institutions of science have failed to provide the transparency that good science and credibility require.

Today’s Technical Standards Overcome Interoperability Obstacles

The concept of ”open science” involves scientists and researchers publishing, discovering, assessing and accessing not only research reports, but also the data and computation on which research findings are based. Current technology has the capacity to meet these functional requirements but only when the technologies implement existing open software interface and data encoding standards that allow the technologies to interoperate within a worldwide system.

Free and open standards, like TCP/IP and HTTP, encourage innovation and rapid acceptance, resulting in expanded networks of communication and sharing. Users and providers of geospatial technologies and data have been cooperating since 1994 in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)⁷ to develop free and open standards that enable communication between different geoprocessing systems from different vendors and of different types: GIS, Earth imaging systems, navigation systems, location services, sensor webs, databases, etc. Requirements have come from a wide range of stakeholders, resulting in a framework of open standards that enable, among other things, Web-based applications for publishing, discovering, assessing and accessing geoscientific data and computational resources.

Icerberg cleavage. Courtesy of Fotolia.

Implementations of the CSW standard make possible fine-grained searches of many kinds. For example, a wildlife biologist studying ducks in Canada might publish data that happen to include water temperature readings at certain locations. Years later (if the metadata included basic information about the temperature readings), a hydrologist searching for historical surface water temperature data in that region could easily discover this data, along with information about when and how the data were collected. Metadata tools, some free and open source⁹, are already available that streamline the creation of such metadata, and open source software code is available that streamlines implementation of CSW by software developers.

It is important for scientists to begin thinking in terms of Web services rather than file-based computing. Google Maps, for example, is a service offered over the Internet, enabled by the Web. A query returns useful information and little is required of the user in terms of expertise or hardware and software. Wolfram Alpha¹⁰ is perhaps a better example, because it is a Web service that provides sophisticated analytical capabilities that operate on many different kinds of data available from government agencies and other sources. The point is that both distributed data and diverse software services can be “in the cloud,” and this rapidly advancing paradigm promises to revolutionize the geosciences.

OGC Web Services standards specify the open interfaces and encodings necessary for building open Web services that provide access to virtually any kind of vector or raster data as well as processing functions that use that data. OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards¹¹ enable developers to make any Web-accessible sensor and/or sensor data repository discoverable, accessible and useable via the Web. This includes Earth observation sensors. Many, but not all, of the standards necessary for chaining of Web services, as in climate models, for example, are available. Others are in development.

Some geoscience communities, notably those involved in hydrology¹² and in meteorology and ocean observation¹³, have begun working in OGC Technical Committee working groups to facilitate their data sharing efforts based on these standards. Typically, this IT standards activity builds on prior data coordination efforts. Other OGC working groups¹⁴ focus on topics such as data preservation, geospatial rights management, data quality, geosemantics and workflow, all of which have significance for open science.

Wildlfire in the Amazon. Courtesy of Fotolia.

This brief discussion of standards leaves many important questions unanswered, such as: What is to be done with currently available data and services on the Web that do not implement standards? How will researchers’ data dictionaries be coordinated for cross-disciplinary studies? How much metadata expertise will be required of scientists, and will each data producer produce their own metadata?

A key question is “Who will pay for this?” David Hastings, creator of the Human Security Index, in a comment on my August Earthzine article, noted, “Geoscience Australia, formerly using the long-established restrictive Crown Copyright, now protects its intellectual property via the 21st century approach of Creative Commons licensing.” Will Geoscience Australia’s embrace of Creative Commons licensing become the norm or remain the exception? Standards from the OGC and other standards organizations provide much of the infrastructure for a market in proprietary scientific information. The market is important, because curation is essential but not free, and governments will almost certainly not pay all the costs. Someone has to review data and edit and index the literature; maintain the information in readable form, and keep it online as platforms change; and promulgate the use of specific standards. Technical standards will be necessary in Web-mediated management of privacy, liability and intellectual property, as well as professional attribution, a main currency of science.

Such questions require institutional responses. Technological change induces institutional change, but can the pace of institutional change keep up with the pace of technological change? Search companies and social networking companies, not geoscience institutions, are the main innovators in “data science”¹⁵, which focuses on turning massive datasets and data streams into information products. The institutions of science will need to imagine challenging scenarios. For example, what will be the result of millions, and soon billions, of sensor-packed cell phones, automobiles and buildings streaming location-specific environmental data into public repositories? What if these streams of data and associated, increasingly capable and publicly available cloud services result in a surge of citizen science? How will data integrity be addressed in this scenario?

We can expect funding institutions, publishers, scientific associations, universities and scientists themselves to develop new policies, behaviors, business models, funding propositions, and long-term data curation solutions. This will happen partly in response to new capabilities enabled by new technologies and technical standards, and partly in response to social, economic and political factors.

We know that none of this “just happens.” Each step depends on people making decisions and taking actions. The third article in this series will consider some of the risks and opportunities that will figure in such decisions.

References

¹ “http://www.earthzine.org/2010/08/04/18-reasons-for-open-publication-of-geoscience-data/.
² Transactions, American Geophysical Union http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010EO340001.shtml
³ http://www.geosociety.org/positions/pos7_dataOA.pdf
⁴ http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10348
⁵ Geoscience Depends on Geospatial Information Standards, Siri Jodha Khalsa and George Percivall. In the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Newsletter, December 2010. http://www.grss-ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/12.10.pdf
⁶ Preserving Geospatial Data: Challenges and Opportunities, Steven P. Morris
In the Proceedings Indo-US Workshop on International Trends in Digital Preservation, March 24-25, 2009.
⁷ http://www.opengeospatial.org
⁸ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geospatial_metadata
⁹ http://www.oceanteacher.org/OTMediawiki/index.php/Metadata_Tools
¹⁰ http://www.wolframalpha.com/
¹¹ http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/markets-technologies/swe
¹² http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/hydrologydwg
¹³ http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/meteodwg
¹⁴ http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/wg
¹⁵ “What is data science?” Mike Loukides, O’Reilly Radar
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/what-is-data-science.html

Lance McKee was on the startup team of the OGC in 1994 and currently serves as Senior Staff Writer. Over the years he has served on local not-for-profits (in Worcester, Massachusetts) and written to promote awareness of issues involving climate, energy and watershed awareness. His interests include the evolving use of information technology in science.