Nadine Alameh

The Emerging Concepts and Applications of the Spatial Web Portal

Geospatial metadata, data, and services have been widely collected, developed and deployed in recent years. This flourishing of geospatial resources also added to the problem of geospatial heterogeneity. Interoperability research and implementation are needed for advancement in potential solutions to integrate and interoperate these widely dispersed geospatial resources. We propose the Spatial Web Portal architecture to integrate and interoperate geospatial resources. The architecture leverages web-based computing, spatial web services, and web fragments to integrate geospatial metadata, data, analysis, and presentation, through distributed portlets: (1) Spatial web services are adopted to interoperate geospatial components. (2) Web portals are adopted to integrate web pages from web fragments generated by portlets. (3) W3C recommendations are adopted to provide access to remote portlets delegating geospatial components. (4) Java community specifications are adopted to facilitate the development and distribution of portlets. NASA’s Earth Science Gateway (ESG) is designed and developed as an example to test the proposed architecture in sharing earth observations, simulations, and other geospatial resources. The proposed architecture and example system provide (a) a tested mechanism for interoperating geospatial resources at different levels, (b) an environment to test new interoperable concepts, and (c) a platform to support heterogeneous-geospatial-resource based applications of national and global significance, such as the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) applications.

Improving Disaster Management Using Earth Observations—GEOSS and CEOS Activities

This paper describes how the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) are individually and collaboratively strengthening worldwide ability for agencies to manage the disasters lifecycle. The Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP) of GEO has, through an agile development process, deployed and tested advanced information systems for Earth Observations based on interoperability arrangements. In particular, AIP has focused on several disaster management scenarios resulting in an architecture that has improved the ready viability and usability of data for disasters. CEOS is constructing a reference architecture, intended to streamline access to satellite data and services for disaster management and risk assessment. The CEOS approach aims to support disaster management activities with satellite information in a holistic fashion, taking account of their overlaps and interdependencies. Jointly GEO and CEOS are now working to align the approaches for disaster management to describe enterprise components and improve understanding of contributed systems and their roles. The coordination has lead to refinements of the Disaster Management Scenario via further implementation in AIP-5. By collaborating via the CEOS working groups and the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) communities of practice, these efforts are intended to engage the international community focused on disaster management and risk assessment to fully utilize remote sensing resources for societal benefit.

NASA's Earth Science Gateway: A Platform for Interoperable Services in Support of the GEOSS Vision

NASA’s Earth Science Gateway (ESG) is designed to streamline access to distributed geospatial data, imagery, models and visualizations through open, standard Web protocols. As such, ESG enables scientists, decision-makers, and others to access a wide variety of observations and predictions of natural and human phenomena related to Earth Science from NASA and other sources. This paper describes ESG in the context of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) initiative, focusing primarily on how a standards-based extensible platform such as ESG can bring together distributed resources to create an environment that can best support the GEOSS architecture.

Strengthening disaster management using Earth Observations - GEOSS and CEOS activities

This paper describes how GEOSS and CEOS are individually and collaboratively strengthening the worlds ability to manage the disasters lifecycle. The Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP) of GEOSS has, through an agile development process, deployed and tested advanced information systems for Earth Observations based on interoperability arrangements. In particular AIP has focused on several Disaster Management Scenarios resulting in an architecture that has improved the ready viability and usability of data for disasters. CEOS is constructing a reference architecture, intended to streamline access to satellite data and services for disaster management. The CEOS approach aims to support disaster management activities with satellite information in a holistic fashion, taking account of their overlaps and interdependencies. Jointly GEOSS and CEOS are now working to align the approaches for Disaster Management to describe enterprise components and improve understanding of contributed systems and their roles. The coordination will lead to refinements of the Disaster Management Scenario via further implementation in AIP-5. By collaborating via the CEOS working groups and GEOSS communities of practice, these efforts are intended to engage the international community focused on disaster management to fully utilize remote sensing resources for societal benefit.

Innovation in OGC: The Interoperability Program

The OGC Interoperability Program is a source of innovation in the development of open standards. The approach to innovation is based on hands-on; collaborative engineering leading to more mature standards and implementations. The process of the Interoperability Program engages a community of sponsors and participants based on an economic model that benefits all involved. Each initiative begins with an innovative approach to identify interoperability needs followed by agile software development to advance the state of technology to the benefit of society. Over eighty initiatives have been conducted in the Interoperability Program since the breakthrough Web Mapping Testbed began the program in 1999. OGC standards that were initiated in Interoperability Program are the basis of two thirds of the certified compliant products.

Expanding GeoWeb to an internet of things

Connecting our world with accessible networks is scaling to trillions of everyday objects. The Internet of Things, Pervasive Computing, Sensor Web are research names for this development. Planetary Skin, Smarter Planet and CeNSE are several corporate names. The Internet will be augmented with mobile machine-to-machine communications and ad-hoc local network technologies. At the network nodes, information about objects will come from barcodes, RFIDs, and sensors. The location of all objects will be known. This workshop seeks to explore the role of location in expanding GeoWeb to an Internet of Things. The workshop seeks presentations on functions enabled by geographic location and to location relative to surrounding objects. Most of the objects will be indoor in a 3D setting. The workshop also seeks presentations on relevant technologies such as location determination, geocoding, schemas for points of interest, ad-hoc network formation based on location, processing of information of the objects to detect phenomena of interest and location based services. Technology standards will be important for interoperability at this scale, e.g., OpenLS, CityGML, and Sensor Web Enablement standards from the OGC.