governance issues governance dimensions of data access infrastructures rob atkinson social change...
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Governance Issues
Governance Dimensions of data access infrastructures
Rob Atkinson
Social Change Online
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Governance
Policy
Design
Technology
Implementation
Cost-effectiveness of components established
Design has to be informed by governance(policy implementation) but also by implementation
Governance of components:•Catalogues•Common Models•Service Level Agreements
Technology can be driven by policy
Lessons Learned
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Overview
Business Realities
Standards Lifecycles
Semantic interoperability
Within-domain consistency
Cross-domain enablement
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Business Realities
Scalable infrastructures must be adopted to be successful
One or two infrastructure paradigms per “node”
Current capabilities maintained
New ones trialled
Must be no significant barriers to adoption
Technical complexity of system vs simplicity of managing a node
Critical mass and community expectation ultimately wins
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Business Realities
•Fear of change is overwhelming
Even when change is an acknowledged necessity!
•No solution is deployed, so all face scepticism
•Needs to provide obvious value
But more importantly needs to be seen as the simplest route for individual players
•Commitment of major players required
But within a governance framework that others are comfortable with
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Business Realities
It’s the future that matters
Is it a business risk to go a particular route?
But the future is viewed through the present..
Are safe, productive, easy steps being offered?
Is there a commitment and capacity to manage infrastructure?
Is it adaptable and scalable?
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Standards
Standards
Layer upon layer…
Encapsulate the “hard yards” into easy to use components
Easy to use only if the complete standards stack supported by quality implementations
Often multiple competing options
Usually due to poor separation of concerns
Typically forced to use a “poor” (ad-hoc) encoding because it’s the only semantic framework available…
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Standards Lifecycle
Existing practice
Identified need to harmonise and extend
Roadmap
delegation to working group
Drafts
Revision
Testing
Adoption as baseline
Update strategy
Deprecation
Decommissioning
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Semantic Interoperability
No über-model exists
Communities of practice Commitment and business drivers
Re-usability and utility
Existence of a governance structure
Semantics are declared not inferred “This WCS serves MODIS data”
MODIS is not self-describing!
Semantics implemented as a result of delegation Delegate spatial semantics to OGC
IHO defines maritime navigation features IHO delegates to ISO content standards
Etc
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Within-domain consistency
Achieved by reuse of semantic elements
By declaration
The good news:
Reuse is easy for lazy people
Productive people are “strategically lazy”
Reuse means power Standard nuts and bolts means powered tools are economically
feasible
Graphics libraries means games programmers don’t need to know much 3D geometry
Factor metadata around governance
Governance enables reuse!
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Practical considerations
No rocket science
Clearly delineate roles with respect to necessarily reusable artefacts
The entity creating a data server might be the person who defines the data specification
OGC specs tend to assume it is (IMHO a simplification that causes a complex problem)
But in general, interoperability demands that the definition is agreed in a broader community
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
The “USER” will “DISCOVER” “DATA” and “ACCESS” it.
Means a lot of work somewhere…
We can model (and implement!) what is required
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
ud Use Case Model
Data Product Specification Manager
Data Contributor
Data Product User
«Publish»Usage Note
Establish Serv er
«Publish»Serv ice Metadata
Discov er Data (DIS)
Access data (ACC)
«Publish»Data Access
Query Templates
«Publish»Vocabularies
Visualise Data
«Publish»Presentation Rules
«Publish»Schema
«Publish»Context
(Quickmap)
Standards Coordinator
«Publish»Serv ice Profile
«Publish»Finder
Application Manager Domain Expert
«include»
«include»
«extend»
«realize»
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
What it means
Infrastructure must:
Define (or adopt) component standards (schemas for metadata artefacts)
Deploy capable components
Define governance arrangements – how are these roles assigned
Be a viable business proposition to participate
As one of a very few active participations!
Broker interoperability with other infrastructures
Have a strategy to adapt and adopt new expectations
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Case study: biological observations
Typical query:
What threatened species have been recorded in area X?
a “join” is required between separately managed sources of information:
Taxonomy – terms, synonyms and hierarchy
Grouping – e.g. status according to Schedule A
Records
Spatial constraint
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Join-in-situ at Data Access Service
Data AccessService
Term(s)
Grouping type
Term List(preferred)
Record Set(with synonyms,
Groupings,Preferred terms)
SynonymsUsed
Groupings
Records
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Query..
Taxonomy
Term(s)
Grouping type
Record Set(with inconsistent
local synonyms only)
GroupingPreferred Term(s)
(for grouping)
Taxonomy
Preferred Term(s)
Terms and synonyms
Data AccessServiceRegister
Local synonyms
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Response…
Extract termsTaxonomy(Grouping)Term(s)
If results to be presented according to grouping – e.g. Threatened, Vulnerable etcGroupings
per term
TaxonomyService
Term List(with preferred terms identified)
Sort results
Record Set(with synonyms)
Presented Results
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Over Hurdle 1…..
Automate update of terms, from point of-truth services:
TaxonomyServiceClient
Term List(preferred)
SynonymsUsed
Groupings
Records
Grouping
Taxonomy
harvest
update
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Wrappers around “immutable” data sources:
WrapperTerm(s)
Grouping typeTerm List(preferred)
Record Set(with synonyms,
Groupings,Preferred terms)
Synonyms
Groupings
Records
Data AccessService
TaxonomyServiceClient
Grouping
Taxonomy
Synonyms usedA vocab from dataService – must matchSynonyms in taxonomy
High-bandw
idthlink
AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005
Solution success criteria
Meets requirements
can be extended to encompass more data services
can be extended by new ways of looking at the data
data is as simply re-usable as possible
has clear and achievable governance requirements
promises reasonable performance
can be implemented in a partial solution initially
provides mechanisms for improving data consistency over time