The Next Grand Challenge: Multi-disciplinary Interoperability

Transcription

1 The Next Grand Challenge: Multi-disciplinary Interoperability 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) (1) EC JRC, Italy (2) BRGM, France (3) CNR, Italy (4) IIASA, Austria (5) IEEE, France INSPIRE Conference, Edinburgh, 27 June-1 July 2011

2 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)

3 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

4 Global research extending collaboration Research dominated by the natural sciences to research involving the full range of sciences and humanities. Natural Sciences 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. Social Sciences Health Sciences Humanities Engineering We need to move from disciplinary research to multidisciplinary research with more involvement of the ultimate stakeholders.

5 Five ICSU Grand Challenges 1. FORECASTING Improve the usefulness of forecasts of environmental conditions and their consequences for people 5. INNOVATING Encourage innovation (coupled with sound mechanisms for evaluation) in developing technological, policy, and social responses to achieve global sustainability 2. OBSERVING Develop, enhance and integrate the observation systems needed to manage global and regional environmental change 4. RESPONDING Determine what institutional, economic and behavioral changes can enable effective steps toward global sustainability 3. CONFINING Determine how to anticipate, avoid and manage disruptive global environmental change

6 Our Earth is a Unique Planet in the Solar System Runaway greenhouse Loss of carbon from Gilberto Camara (INPE): Lecture delivered at Vespucci Summer Institute 2010

7 Multi-disciplinarity the challenges Integration between different disciplines requires important scientific trans-disciplinary efforts. Different communities have different theoretical approaches, analytical practices, and multiple layers of tacit knowledge developed through education and professional experience. 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. Machine Human Process 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.

8 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.

9 GEOSS The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) provides the indispensable framework to coordinate the earth observation efforts of the 86 GEOmembers and 61 participating organisations. 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.

10 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

11 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 1 st 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.

12 Three Interoperability Development Phases

13 Two iterations: Initial Operating Capability and Advanced Operating Capability INSPIRE GEOSS Web 2.0 Multiscale Workflow GMES NL Requirements Inputs Forestry requirements Biodiv. requirements IOC extensions AOC Drought requirements Apply to Ecosys. Weather. Ocean

14 ENABLING SYNTACTIC INTEROPERABILITY: THE EUROGEOSS BROKER

15 GEO Portals GEO Clearinghouse Catalogs GCI GEO Registries INSPIRE Portals Communities Portals EuroGEOSS IOC Web 2.0 clients MD Editor Semantic-enabled functionalities EuroGEOSS Brokering Platform (GeoRSS support) BROKER THREDDS/ OPeNDAP Data Registries Data Services Data (Transactional) Catalogs Data Web 2.0 Resources

16 EuroGEOSS: Distribution & Mediation Platform Profiler CS-W/ OpenSearch EuroGEOSS Brokering Platform Common Data Model Distributor Asynchronous messaging OWS Accessors CS-W AP Accessors Accessor CS-W(T)/ ISO AP GBIF Accessor CS-W/ ebrim-cim AP CS-W/ ebrim-eo AP ISO Core profile +Extensions(e b-rim/cim /EO). OpenSearch Accessor THREDDS/O PeNDAP Accessor CDI Accessor. Extended Interface RIM-EO Local Repository RIM-CIM Local Repository Caching ISO Local Repository

17 ENABLING SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY: SEMANTIC AUGMENTATION COMPONENTS

18 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. Coordinate reference systems"@en parameter"@en inspire:1 skos:preflabel "Параметър"@bg skos:preflabel Географска skos:closematch skos:preflabel skos:preflabel gemet:6033 "longitude"@en skos:narrower gemet:14935 gemet:14937 skos:preflabel skos:preflabel skos:narrower "Координатна система"@bg skos:narrower "Географска ширина"@bg skos:preflabel skos:preflabel gemet:14936 co-ordinate system"@en skos:preflabel latitude"@en

19 Semantic enhanced functionalities

20 Semantic Augmentation Component (Mediator)???? CSW/ISO Discovery Broker Adapter Client OpenSearch Extended Interface (semantic) Semantic Augmentation Component Adapter Adapter? SKOS/RDF?? Thesaurus A Thesaurus B... Gazetteer

21 INTEROPERABILITY OF PROCESSES

22 Rationale 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.

23 Executing workflows 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.

24 EXTENDING INTEROPERABILITY TO SOCIAL NETWORKS

25 Web 2.0 resources support Adaptor Geonames OpenSearch(-geo) interface Adaptor Twitter Adaptor Flickr CSW/ISO Discovery Broker Adaptor OpenStreet Map Adaptor Wikipedia Geocommons

26 EuroGEOSS is also 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).

27 For more information The EuroGEOSS Project and Broker ( DEMOS: Semantic augmentation component for Drought and e-habitat pilots in GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilots-3:

28 Thank you for your attention