Mattia Santoro

Integrative Research: The EuroGEOSS Experience

The implementation of the INSPIRE Directive in Europe and similar efforts around the globe to develop spatial data infrastructures and global systems of systems have been largely focusing on the adoption of agreed technologies, standards, and specifications to address the interoperability challenge. However, addressing the key scientific challenges of humanity in the 21st century requires a more comprehensive integrative research effort, which in turn may pose more complex requirements on the systems to be integrated, and increase the number of arrangements required to support them. This paper analyses the main challenges related to integrative interoperability, such as mutual understanding of requirements and methods, theoretical underpinning, and tacit knowledge. To illustrate our contribution to the integrative research, the paper proposes the flexible approach to interoperability, based on mediation and brokering, that has been implemented by the EuroGEOSS research project. It also demonstrates that this approach allows scientific and non-scientific stakeholders to overcome the increased complexity of the integration effort mentioned above and charts the trajectory for the evolution of current spatial data infrastructures.

Inter-disciplinary interoperability for global sustainability research

The implementation of the INSPIRE Directive in Europe and similar efforts around the globe to develop spatial data infrastructures and global systems of systems have been focusing largely on the adoption of agreed technologies, standards, and specifications to meet the (systems) interoperability challenge. Addressing the key scientific challenges of humanity in the 21st century requires however a much increased inter-disciplinary effort, which in turn makes more complex demands on the type of systems and arrangements needed to support it. This paper analyses the challenges for inter-disciplinary interoperability using the experience of the EuroGEOSS research project. It argues that inter-disciplinarity requires mutual understanding of requirements, methods, theoretical underpinning and tacit knowledge, and this in turn demands for a flexible approach to interoperability based on mediation, brokering and semantics-aware, cross-thematic functionalities. The paper demonstrates the implications of adopting this approach and charts the trajectory for the evolution of current spatial data infrastructures.

Bringing GEOSS Services into Practice: A Capacity Building Resource on Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI)

Data discoverability, accessibility, and integration are frequent barriers for scientists and a major obstacle for favorable results on environmental research. To tackle this issue, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) is leading the development of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), a voluntary effort that connects Earth Observation resources world-wide, acting as a gateway between producers and users of environmental data. GEO recognizes the importance of capacity building and education to reach large adoption, acceptance and commitment on data sharing principles to increase the capacity to access and use Earth Observations data. This article presents “Bringing GEOSS services into practice” (BGSIP), an integrated set of teaching material and software to facilitate the publication and use of environmental data through standardized discovery, view, download, and processing services, further facilitating the registration of data into GEOSS. So far, 520 participants in 10 countries have been trained using this material, leading to numerous Spatial Data Infrastructure implementations and 1,000 tutorial downloads. This workshop lowers the entry barriers for both data providers and users, facilitates the development of technical skills, and empowers people.

Prod-Trees: Semantic Search for Earth Observation Products

Access to Earth Observation products remains difficult for end users in most domains. Although various search engines have been developed, they neither satisfy the needs of scientific communities for advanced search of EO products, nor they use standardized vocabularies reusable from other organizations. To address this, we present the Prod-Trees platform, a semantically-enabled search engine for EO products enhanced with EO-netCDF, a new standard for accessing Earth Observation products.

Exploring the depths of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems

Abstract This paper explores for the first time the contents, structure and relationships across institutions and disciplines of a global Big Earth Data cyber-infrastructure: the Global Earth Observation System of System (GEOSS). The analysis builds on 1.8 million metadata records harvested in GEOSS. Because this set includes almost all the major large data collections in GEOSS, the analysis represents more than 80% of all the data made available through this global system. We explore two major aspects: the collaborative networks and the thematic coverage in GEOSS. The first connects the contributing organisations through the more than 200,000 keywords used in the systems, and then explores who is citing whom, a proxy for of institutional thickness. The thematic coverage is analysed through neural network algorithms, first on the keywords, and then on the corpus of 653 million lemmatised lower case words built from the titles and abstracts of all 1.8 million metadata records. The findings not only give a good overview of the GEOSS data universe, but offer immediate priorities on how to increase the usability of GEOSS through improved data management, and the opportunity to augment the metadata with high level concept that synthetise well the contents of the data-set.

Semantic Search for Earth Observartion Products using Ontology Services

Access to Earth Observation products remains difficult for end users in most domains. Although various search engines have been developed, they neither satisfy the needs of scientific communities for advanced search of EO products, nor do they use standardized vocabularies reusable from other organizations. To address this, we present the Prod-Trees platform, a semantically-enabled search engine for EO products enhanced with EO-netCDF, a new standard for accessing Earth Observation products.