Max Craglia(1), Francis Bertrand(2), Stefano Nativi(3), Gerimantas Gaigalas(1), Gregoire Dubois(1), Juergen Vogt(1), Stefen Fritz(4) and Jay

Pearlman(5)

The Next Grand Challenge: Multi-disciplinary

Interoperability

(1) EC–JRC, Italy

(2) BRGM, France

(3) CNR, Italy

(4) IIASA, Austria

(5) IEEE, France

INSPIRE Conference, Edinburgh, 27 June-1 July 2011

Introduction

One of the most fundamental challenges facing humanity at the beginning of the 21st

century is to respond effectively to the global changes that are increasing pressure on

the environment and on human society.

Over the next decade the global scientific community must take on the

challenge of delivering to society the knowledge and information necessary to

assess the risks humanity is facing from global change and to understand how

society can effectively mitigate dangerous changes and cope with the change

that we cannot manage. We refer to this field as ‘global sustainability research’

(ICSU, 2010)

Sustainability Science Core Questions

� How can the dynamic interactions between nature and society be

better incorporated in emerging models and conceptualizations

that integrate the earth system, human development and

sustainability?

� How are long-term trends in environment and development,

including consumption and population, reshaping nature-society

interactions in ways relevant to sustainability?

� What determines vulnerability/resilience of nature-society

interactions for particular places and for particular types of

ecosystems and human livelihoods?

� What if we go to extremes?

Source: Sustainability Science Workshop, Friibergh, SE, 2000

Global research – extending collaboration

• Research dominated by the natural sciences to

research involving the full range of sciences and

humanities.Natural

Sciences

Social

Sciences

Health

SciencesHumanities

Engineering

We need to move from disciplinary research to multidisciplinary research with

more involvement of the ultimate stakeholders.

• Social sciences have long been a component

of Earth system research, but tackling the

ICSU grand challenges requires a stronger

involvement and greater integration of the

social sciences, health sciences, engineering,

humanities, along with the natural sciences.

Five ICSU Grand Challenges

2. OBSERVING

Develop, enhance and integrate the observation

systems needed to manage global and

regional environmental change

1. FORECASTING

Improve the usefulness of forecasts of environmental

conditions and their consequences for people

3. CONFINING

Determine how to anticipate, avoid and

manage disruptive global

environmental change

4. RESPONDING

Determine what institutional, economic

and behavioral changes can enable

effective steps toward global

sustainability

5. INNOVATING

Encourage innovation (coupled with sound

mechanisms for evaluation) in developing technological,

policy, and social responses

to achieve global sustainability

Our Earth is a Unique Planet in the Solar System

Loss of

carbon

from Gilberto Camara (INPE): Lecture delivered at Vespucci Summer Institute 2010

Runaway

greenhouse

Multi-disciplinarity – the challenges

Integration between different disciplines requires important

scientific trans-disciplinary efforts.

Syntactic interoperability is when two or more systems are capable of communicating and exchanging data, they are exhibiting

syntactic interoperability. Specified data formats, communication protocols and the like are fundamental.

Semantic interoperability is the ability to automatically interpret the information exchanged meaningfully and accurately in order

to produce useful results as defined by the end users of both systems.

Process

Human

Machine

•This includes different terminologies and ontologies adopted when

creating information, processing them, and implementing related

services.

•To make sense of these differences and bridge the gaps in

understanding, we need, as first steps, to enable syntactic and

semantic interoperability of both information and processes.

•Different communities have different theoretical approaches,

analytical practices, and multiple layers of tacit knowledge

developed through education and professional experience.

Public participation

• Research and Development will often be most useful, and the results most

readily accepted by users, if priorities are shaped with the active

involvement of potential users of research results.

• An effective response to global environmental change will be aided by the

co-creation of new knowledge with a broad range of stakeholders through

participatory practices.

• Two key priorities:

– Communicating science more effectively to close the gap with citizens and policy

makers.

– Engaging the public in the scientific process such as helping monitoring the

environment, reporting observed and perceived changes and impacts for example via

social networks.

GEOSS

• GEOSS promotes scientific connections and

interactions between the observation

systems that constitute the system of

systems, and addresses some of the

scientific challenges identified by ICSU.

• GEOSS also promotes the introduction of

innovative scientific techniques and

technologies in the component observing

systems.

• The Global Earth Observation System of

Systems (GEOSS) provides the

indispensable framework to coordinate the

earth observation efforts of the 86 GEO-

members and 61 participating

organisations.

European contributions to GEOSS

• European Commission plays a very active role in developing GEOSS:

– Participating in and co-chairing GEOSS Committees and co-leading GEO Tasks.

– Implementing important initiatives to collect and share environmental information

for the benefit of the European and global society: INSPIRE Directive, the GMES

and SEIS initiatives.

– Funding R&D projects in FP6 and FP7 that develop the research base and provide

resources contributing to GEOSS.-

– Reaching out to developing countries to provide a broad knowledge base

The EuroGEOSS Project

• The concept of multidisciplinary interoperability and the need for it in

managing societal issues is central to the addressing the challenges of

sustainability research identified by ICSU.

• With this in mind, the EuroGEOSS project was launched on May 1st 2009

for a three year period. The project addresses a specific call which is “The

European Environment Earth Observation system supporting INSPIRE

and compatible with GEOSS”.

• EuroGEOSS aims to demonstrate the added value to the scientific

community and society of making existing earth observing systems and

applications interoperable and used within the GEOSS and INSPIRE

frameworks.

• Thematic communities addressed:

Forest, Biodiversity, Drought.

Three Interoperability Development Phases

WeatherEcosys. Ocean

Apply to

F .

Two iterations: Initial Operating Capability and

Advanced Operating Capability

Requirements

GMES

INSPIRE

GEOSS

IOC

Forestry

Biodiv.

Drought

requirements

requirements

requirements

Inputs

NL

Multi-scale

Work-flowWeb 2.0

AOCextensions

ENABLING SYNTACTIC INTEROPERABILITY:

THE EUROGEOSS BROKER

ServicesDataCatalogsRegistries

Data

(Transactional)Data

Data

THREDDS/

OPeNDAP

EuroGEOSS

IOC

GEO Portals

GEO

Clearinghouse

Catalogs

GEO Registries

GCI

Web 2.0

Resources

EuroGEOSS Brokering Platform (GeoRSS support)

BROKER

Semantic-enabled functionalities

MD Editor

INSPIRE

PortalsCommunities

PortalsWeb 2.0

clients

EuroGEOSS Brokering Platform

EuroGEOSS: Distribution &

Mediation Platform

OWS

Accessors

CS-W AP

Accessors

GBIF Accessor

THREDDS/O

PeNDAP

Accessor

CS-W(T)/

ISO AP

CS-W/

OpenSearch

OpenSearch

Accessor

Common

Data Model

ISO 19115

Core profile

… .

Distributor

Asynchronous

messaging

CDI

Accessor

… .CS-W/

ebRIM-CIM AP+Extensions(e

b-RIM/CIM

/EO)

Accessor

CS-W/

ebRIM-EO AP

Profiler

Extended

InterfaceRIM-EO

Local Repository

RIM-CIM

Local Repository

ISO

Local Repository

Caching

ENABLING SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY:

SEMANTIC AUGMENTATION COMPONENTS

Semantic Augmentation Component

• A text-based query is applied for deriving terms containing the search

keyword in labels, definitions, and descriptions.

• The set of terms matching the keyword is extended with terms

narrower/broader/related to them.

skos:prefLabel

skos:narrower

skos:narrower

skos:prefLabel

gemet:14937

gemet:14936

gemet:6033

“Географска дължина”@bg

"longitude"@en

“latitude"@en

skos:prefLabel

skos:prefLabel

skos:prefLabel

skos:prefLabel“co-ordinate system"@en

"Параметър"@bg

“parameter"@en

skos:narrower

skos:prefLabel

gemet:14935

"Координатна система"@bg skos:prefLabel"Географска ширина"@bg

inspire:1

skos:closeMatch

skos:prefLabel

“Coordinate reference systems"@en

Semantic enhanced functionalities

SKOS/RDF

Semantic Augmentation Component

Semantic

Augmentation

ComponentOpenSearch

Extended

Interface

(semantic)

Thesaurus A

Gazetteer

Adapter

Adapter

(Mediator)

Adapter

Discovery BrokerCSW/ISO

Thesaurus B

.. .

?? ???

?

?

?

Client

INTEROPERABILITY OF

PROCESSES

•Semantic annotations and ontologies integration allow a shared

understanding among multiple disciplines of key concepts, and available

resources.

•Beyond Search and Access, we need also to develop a shared

understanding of what do you do with the data? How do you frame a

problem and possible solution according to different disciplinary

approaches.

•This quest requires to describe not just concepts but also processes or

workflows, leading, eventually, to new executable web services that are

understood across disciplines.

Rationale

• Executable workflows and models can then be integrated by the

EuroGEOSS broker that can interface with the existing web services,

whatever the interoperability standards used.

• The quality of the composition of different workflows is also assesses.

The project defines also a set of minimum necessary metadata needed

to provide quality information at workflow level. Quality metadata and

measures are fundamental when using/testing different sources and of

changing the scale or adapting the model with various scales.

Executing workflows

EXTENDING INTEROPERABILITY

TO SOCIAL NETWORKS

Web 2.0 resources support

Discovery

Broker

CSW/ISO

Adaptor

Geonames

Twitter

Flickr

OpenStreet

Map

Wikipedia

Adaptor

Adaptor

Adaptor

Adaptor

Geocommons

OpenSearch(-geo) interface

EuroGEOSS is alsoF

• Natural Language Processing discover and query interface.

• Cost-benefit analysis for the development of a European and Global

Spatial Data Infrastructure.

• Extending the EuroGeoss multidisciplinary approach to:

– Terrestrial, Athmospheric and Marine enviroments

(May 2011).

– Weather, Ocean and Water domains

(September 2011).

For more informationF

The EuroGEOSS Project and

Broker (www.eurogeoss.eu)

Semantic augmentation component for Drought

and e-Habitat pilots in GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilots-3:http://www.ogcnetwork.net/pub/ogcnetwork/GEOSS/AIP3/pages/Demo.html

DEMOS:

Thank you

for your attention