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Chapter 13
Interoperability, Data Discovery
and Access: The e-Infrastructures
for Earth Sciences Resources
S. Nativi, C. Schmullius, L. Bigagli, and R. Gerlach
Abstract
The ever-increasing need to integrate knowledge from the diverse dis-
ciplines of the Earth System sciences requires to switch from data-centric systems
towards service-oriented enabling infrastructures. Important international initiatives
and programmes are defining a standard baseline for interoperability of geospatial
information, models and technologies, in particular for data discovery and access.
We describe the design of an e-infrastructure for Earth Sciences, from the point of
view of the data, services and distribution model. This design is implemented in the
Siberian Earth System Science Cluster (SIB-ESS-C), an e-infrastructure supporting
the generation and distribution of products and information about central Siberia,
along with advanced analysis tools for Earth Sciences.
Keywords
Interoperability • Geospatial information • Spatial data infrastruc-
ture • Siberia • Earth Observation
13.1 Introduction
Scientific and technological advancements in sensors, remote sensing and aerospace
industry are set to increase exponentially the availability of geospatial information,
in the near future. It is estimated that there are currently around 100,000 in-situ
stations and 50 environmental satellites.
1
Likewise, the advancements of research
1
http://ec.europa.eu/research/environment/themes/article_1357_en.htm
S. Nativi (
*
) and L. Bigagli
Italian National Research Council – IMAA and University of Florence, Prato, Italy
e-mail: nativi@imaa.cnr.it; lorenzo.bigagli@pin.unifi.it
C. Schmullius and R. Gerlach
Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena, Italy
e-mail: c.schmullius@uni-jena.de; roman.gerlach@uni-jena.de
H. Balzter (ed.),
Environmental Change in Siberia: Earth Observation,
Field Studies and Modelling
, Advances in Global Change Research 40,
DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8641-9_13, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
213
214
S. Nativi et al.
in environmental sciences, supported by the increasing capacity of computational
platforms and telecommunication infrastructures, will allow to deepen our under-
standing of natural phenomena. Therefore, there is an ever-increasing need to inte-
grate knowledge from the diverse disciplines engaged in studying the constituent
parts of the complex Earth system.
Earth system analysis is a real challenge for scientists as much as it is for information
technology. In fact, the scope and complexity of Earth system investigations
demand for the formation of distributed, multidisciplinary collaborative teams. This
requires the integration of different discipline information systems, characterized by:
heterogeneous and distributed data and metadata models, different semantics and
knowledge, diverse protocols and interfaces, different data policies and security levels
(Foster and Kesselman
2006
). Advanced e-infrastructures (aka cyber-infrastructures)
will support the formation and operation of a Earth System Science Community,
based on multidisciplinary knowledge integration. Developing an advanced
enabling infrastructure to facilitate the Earth system analysis implies to scale from
specific and monolithic systems (data-centric) towards independent and modular
(service-oriented) information systems (Foster and Kesselman
2006
).
Advanced e-infrastructures will provide scientists, researchers and decision
makers with a persistent set of independent services and information that scientists
can integrate into a range of more complex analyses. The importance of the geo-
spatial information to support the decision process and the management of environ-
mental issues at the different scales (i.e. national, international and global) was
already recognized and outlined by the United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development (Rio de Janeiro, June 1992) and by the General Assembly for the
implementation of Agenda 21 (New York, June 1997).
In these years, there were launched important initiatives and programmes by
the European and International Communities to design and build such advanced
e-infrastructures in order to collect, manage and share geospatial information pro-
viding the Society with Earth and environmental information in a handy and near
real-time way. These initiatives are resulting decisive to reach out to the different
Earth Sciences disciplines and systems. The most relevant to our topic are briefly
presented below.
13.1.1 GEOSS
In 2005, member countries of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) agreed on
a 10-year implementation plan for a Global Earth Observation System of Systems
(GEOSS).
2
In 2006, GEO has begun implementation of the GEOSS 10-Year
Implementation Plan as endorsed by the Third Earth Observation Summit. GEOSS
2
http://earthobservations.org/geoss.shtml
13 Interoperability, Data Discovery and Access
215
is a worldwide effort to build upon existing national, regional, and international
systems to provide comprehensive, coordinated Earth observations from thousands
of instruments worldwide, transforming the data they collect into vital information
for society. GEOSS will meet the need for timely, quality long-term global informa-
tion as a basis for sound decision making, and will enhance delivery of benefits to
society in nine Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs), identified as key applications of
GEOSS, namely: Disasters, Health, Energy, Climate, Water, Weather, Ecosystems,
Agriculture, Biodiversity. GEOSS Architecture and interoperability process are
investigated by a couple of pilot initiatives: the Architecture Implementation Pilot
(AIP) (Percival
2008
) and the Interoperability Process Pilot Project (IP3) (Khalsa
et al.
2008
).
13.1.2 GMES
The European Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES)
3
initiative
is a concerted effort promoted by the European Community and the European
Space Agency to bring data and information providers together with users, so they
can better understand each other. GMES will support the implementation of public
policies at European or national level that deal with, for example, agriculture, envi-
ronment, fisheries, or regional development, external relations, security. GMES is
set to be the main European contribution to GEOSS. The main GMES objective is
to make environmental and security-related information available to the people who
need it through enhanced or new services. The services identified by GMES can be
classified in three major categories:
•
Mapping
, including topography or road maps but also land-use and harvest,
forestry monitoring, mineral and water resources that do contribute to short and
long-term management of territories and natural resources. This service gener-
ally requires exhaustive coverage of the Earth surface, archiving and periodic
updating of data.
•
Support for emergency management
in case of natural hazards and particularly
civil protection institutions responsible for the security of people and property.
•
Forecasting
is applied for marine zones, air quality or crop yields. This service
systematically provides data on extended areas permitting the prediction of
short, medium or long-term events, including their modeling and evolution.
The widespread and regular availability of technical data within GMES will allow
a more efficient use of the infrastructures and human resources. It will help the
creation of new models for security and risk management, as well as better manage-
ment of land and resources.
3
http://www.gmes.info
216
S. Nativi et al.
13.1.3 INSPIRE
The Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14
March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European
Community (INSPIRE),
4
as published in the official Journal on the 25 April 2007,
establishes a regional Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) in Europe, also addressing
some aspects of environmental monitoring. INSPIRE is conceived to serve policy-
makers, planners and managers at European, national and local level and the citi-
zens and their organizations, delivering to the users integrated spatial information
services was. The INSPIRE Directive entered into force on the 15 May 2007. Five
Drafting Teams have been designing the directive implementation rules, as far as its
architecture, data policy and monitoring process are concerned. The first approved
regulation concerns metadata.
In the following sections, we elaborate on remote sensing in Siberia and we intro-
duce the current standard baseline for interoperability of geospatial information, pre-
senting the main adopted models and technologies, in particular for data discovery and
access. We introduce the Siberian Earth System Science Cluster (SIB-ESS-C), a large
database of datasets and value-added products spanning the central Siberian region.
SIB-ESS-C realizes a initial SDI (i.e. an e-infrastructure) to generate and distribute
products and information about central Siberia, along with advanced analysis support
for Earth Sciences. This is a valuable example of how scientific data can be published
and accessed under the interoperability paradigm. We present some results concerning
the implementation of advanced access, discovery and processing services for SIB-
ESS-C. The infrastructure architecture applies relevant international standards and best-
practices; its interoperability with the introduced relevant initiatives is argued.
13.2 The Siberian Earth System Science Cluster
The main goal of the Siberian Earth System Science Cluster
5
is to provide an infra-
structure for spatial data to facilitate Earth system science studies in Siberia. The
region under study covers the entire Asian part of the Russian Federation from 58°
E–170° W and 48–80° N. The region comprises a significant part of the Earth’s
boreal biome, but also includes a large portion of the arctic biome and a small por-
tion of the temperate biome in Northern Eurasia. The watersheds of the rivers Ob,
Yenissei and Lena representing the main freshwater source of the Arctic Ocean are
located in this region. Figure
13.1
depicts the interested geographic area. With
respect to Global Climate Change several studies identified Siberia as one of the
hotspots where temperature changes are more pronounced than in other regions of
the world (Hansen et al.
1999
; Zhaomei et al.
2001
; Arctic Climate Impact
4
http://www.ec-gis.org/inspire
5
http://www.sibessc.uni-jena.de
13 Interoperability, Data Discovery and Access
217
Fig. 13.1
The region of interest of SIBERIA-II (inner areas) and SIB-ESS-C (outer bounding box)
(
Color version available in Appendix
)
Assessment
2004
). Understanding the system, its underlying processes and their
interaction is crucial and requires interdisciplinary research. The availability and
access to data and information across discipline boundaries is a prerequisite to any
integrated research approach. Within different scientific fields (e.g. biology, geog-
raphy, oceanography) specific data models, data formats and tools evolved over the
years making it difficult to easily share data and information across them.
13.2.1 Objectives
SIB-ESS-C emerged from the need to preserve a collection of Earth observation
data products created during previous research projects and make this data accessible
to the scientific community as well as the general public. In order to publish data
products in a consistent and well documented manner metadata describing the
content, history and quality of the data is required. The data discovery process
relies heavily on the availability of metadata and its publication using common
standards and Internet services. Hence, the first objective of SIB-ESS-C is to cre-
ate metadata for all data products and publish it through a catalog service allowing
users to identify and locate the data resources. This also includes the development
of a Web interface to perform queries against the catalog service. Once a user is
aware of a data resource, access to the data becomes important. Traditionally, data
products have been retrieved by downloading data files from an FTP site. In SDIs
like SIB-ESS-C, web services are deployed for direct data access via Web. In addi-
tion to data access a user may decide to visualize or analyze the dataset of interest.
The SIB-ESS-C system will provide Web-based tools to explore the spatio-temporal
characteristics of the published data products. Other SIB-ESS-C goals include
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl hannaeva.xlx.pl
Interoperability, Data Discovery
and Access: The e-Infrastructures
for Earth Sciences Resources
S. Nativi, C. Schmullius, L. Bigagli, and R. Gerlach
Abstract
The ever-increasing need to integrate knowledge from the diverse dis-
ciplines of the Earth System sciences requires to switch from data-centric systems
towards service-oriented enabling infrastructures. Important international initiatives
and programmes are defining a standard baseline for interoperability of geospatial
information, models and technologies, in particular for data discovery and access.
We describe the design of an e-infrastructure for Earth Sciences, from the point of
view of the data, services and distribution model. This design is implemented in the
Siberian Earth System Science Cluster (SIB-ESS-C), an e-infrastructure supporting
the generation and distribution of products and information about central Siberia,
along with advanced analysis tools for Earth Sciences.
Keywords
Interoperability • Geospatial information • Spatial data infrastruc-
ture • Siberia • Earth Observation
13.1 Introduction
Scientific and technological advancements in sensors, remote sensing and aerospace
industry are set to increase exponentially the availability of geospatial information,
in the near future. It is estimated that there are currently around 100,000 in-situ
stations and 50 environmental satellites.
1
Likewise, the advancements of research
1
http://ec.europa.eu/research/environment/themes/article_1357_en.htm
S. Nativi (
*
) and L. Bigagli
Italian National Research Council – IMAA and University of Florence, Prato, Italy
e-mail: nativi@imaa.cnr.it; lorenzo.bigagli@pin.unifi.it
C. Schmullius and R. Gerlach
Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena, Italy
e-mail: c.schmullius@uni-jena.de; roman.gerlach@uni-jena.de
H. Balzter (ed.),
Environmental Change in Siberia: Earth Observation,
Field Studies and Modelling
, Advances in Global Change Research 40,
DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8641-9_13, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
213
214
S. Nativi et al.
in environmental sciences, supported by the increasing capacity of computational
platforms and telecommunication infrastructures, will allow to deepen our under-
standing of natural phenomena. Therefore, there is an ever-increasing need to inte-
grate knowledge from the diverse disciplines engaged in studying the constituent
parts of the complex Earth system.
Earth system analysis is a real challenge for scientists as much as it is for information
technology. In fact, the scope and complexity of Earth system investigations
demand for the formation of distributed, multidisciplinary collaborative teams. This
requires the integration of different discipline information systems, characterized by:
heterogeneous and distributed data and metadata models, different semantics and
knowledge, diverse protocols and interfaces, different data policies and security levels
(Foster and Kesselman
2006
). Advanced e-infrastructures (aka cyber-infrastructures)
will support the formation and operation of a Earth System Science Community,
based on multidisciplinary knowledge integration. Developing an advanced
enabling infrastructure to facilitate the Earth system analysis implies to scale from
specific and monolithic systems (data-centric) towards independent and modular
(service-oriented) information systems (Foster and Kesselman
2006
).
Advanced e-infrastructures will provide scientists, researchers and decision
makers with a persistent set of independent services and information that scientists
can integrate into a range of more complex analyses. The importance of the geo-
spatial information to support the decision process and the management of environ-
mental issues at the different scales (i.e. national, international and global) was
already recognized and outlined by the United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development (Rio de Janeiro, June 1992) and by the General Assembly for the
implementation of Agenda 21 (New York, June 1997).
In these years, there were launched important initiatives and programmes by
the European and International Communities to design and build such advanced
e-infrastructures in order to collect, manage and share geospatial information pro-
viding the Society with Earth and environmental information in a handy and near
real-time way. These initiatives are resulting decisive to reach out to the different
Earth Sciences disciplines and systems. The most relevant to our topic are briefly
presented below.
13.1.1 GEOSS
In 2005, member countries of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) agreed on
a 10-year implementation plan for a Global Earth Observation System of Systems
(GEOSS).
2
In 2006, GEO has begun implementation of the GEOSS 10-Year
Implementation Plan as endorsed by the Third Earth Observation Summit. GEOSS
2
http://earthobservations.org/geoss.shtml
13 Interoperability, Data Discovery and Access
215
is a worldwide effort to build upon existing national, regional, and international
systems to provide comprehensive, coordinated Earth observations from thousands
of instruments worldwide, transforming the data they collect into vital information
for society. GEOSS will meet the need for timely, quality long-term global informa-
tion as a basis for sound decision making, and will enhance delivery of benefits to
society in nine Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs), identified as key applications of
GEOSS, namely: Disasters, Health, Energy, Climate, Water, Weather, Ecosystems,
Agriculture, Biodiversity. GEOSS Architecture and interoperability process are
investigated by a couple of pilot initiatives: the Architecture Implementation Pilot
(AIP) (Percival
2008
) and the Interoperability Process Pilot Project (IP3) (Khalsa
et al.
2008
).
13.1.2 GMES
The European Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES)
3
initiative
is a concerted effort promoted by the European Community and the European
Space Agency to bring data and information providers together with users, so they
can better understand each other. GMES will support the implementation of public
policies at European or national level that deal with, for example, agriculture, envi-
ronment, fisheries, or regional development, external relations, security. GMES is
set to be the main European contribution to GEOSS. The main GMES objective is
to make environmental and security-related information available to the people who
need it through enhanced or new services. The services identified by GMES can be
classified in three major categories:
•
Mapping
, including topography or road maps but also land-use and harvest,
forestry monitoring, mineral and water resources that do contribute to short and
long-term management of territories and natural resources. This service gener-
ally requires exhaustive coverage of the Earth surface, archiving and periodic
updating of data.
•
Support for emergency management
in case of natural hazards and particularly
civil protection institutions responsible for the security of people and property.
•
Forecasting
is applied for marine zones, air quality or crop yields. This service
systematically provides data on extended areas permitting the prediction of
short, medium or long-term events, including their modeling and evolution.
The widespread and regular availability of technical data within GMES will allow
a more efficient use of the infrastructures and human resources. It will help the
creation of new models for security and risk management, as well as better manage-
ment of land and resources.
3
http://www.gmes.info
216
S. Nativi et al.
13.1.3 INSPIRE
The Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14
March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European
Community (INSPIRE),
4
as published in the official Journal on the 25 April 2007,
establishes a regional Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) in Europe, also addressing
some aspects of environmental monitoring. INSPIRE is conceived to serve policy-
makers, planners and managers at European, national and local level and the citi-
zens and their organizations, delivering to the users integrated spatial information
services was. The INSPIRE Directive entered into force on the 15 May 2007. Five
Drafting Teams have been designing the directive implementation rules, as far as its
architecture, data policy and monitoring process are concerned. The first approved
regulation concerns metadata.
In the following sections, we elaborate on remote sensing in Siberia and we intro-
duce the current standard baseline for interoperability of geospatial information, pre-
senting the main adopted models and technologies, in particular for data discovery and
access. We introduce the Siberian Earth System Science Cluster (SIB-ESS-C), a large
database of datasets and value-added products spanning the central Siberian region.
SIB-ESS-C realizes a initial SDI (i.e. an e-infrastructure) to generate and distribute
products and information about central Siberia, along with advanced analysis support
for Earth Sciences. This is a valuable example of how scientific data can be published
and accessed under the interoperability paradigm. We present some results concerning
the implementation of advanced access, discovery and processing services for SIB-
ESS-C. The infrastructure architecture applies relevant international standards and best-
practices; its interoperability with the introduced relevant initiatives is argued.
13.2 The Siberian Earth System Science Cluster
The main goal of the Siberian Earth System Science Cluster
5
is to provide an infra-
structure for spatial data to facilitate Earth system science studies in Siberia. The
region under study covers the entire Asian part of the Russian Federation from 58°
E–170° W and 48–80° N. The region comprises a significant part of the Earth’s
boreal biome, but also includes a large portion of the arctic biome and a small por-
tion of the temperate biome in Northern Eurasia. The watersheds of the rivers Ob,
Yenissei and Lena representing the main freshwater source of the Arctic Ocean are
located in this region. Figure
13.1
depicts the interested geographic area. With
respect to Global Climate Change several studies identified Siberia as one of the
hotspots where temperature changes are more pronounced than in other regions of
the world (Hansen et al.
1999
; Zhaomei et al.
2001
; Arctic Climate Impact
4
http://www.ec-gis.org/inspire
5
http://www.sibessc.uni-jena.de
13 Interoperability, Data Discovery and Access
217
Fig. 13.1
The region of interest of SIBERIA-II (inner areas) and SIB-ESS-C (outer bounding box)
(
Color version available in Appendix
)
Assessment
2004
). Understanding the system, its underlying processes and their
interaction is crucial and requires interdisciplinary research. The availability and
access to data and information across discipline boundaries is a prerequisite to any
integrated research approach. Within different scientific fields (e.g. biology, geog-
raphy, oceanography) specific data models, data formats and tools evolved over the
years making it difficult to easily share data and information across them.
13.2.1 Objectives
SIB-ESS-C emerged from the need to preserve a collection of Earth observation
data products created during previous research projects and make this data accessible
to the scientific community as well as the general public. In order to publish data
products in a consistent and well documented manner metadata describing the
content, history and quality of the data is required. The data discovery process
relies heavily on the availability of metadata and its publication using common
standards and Internet services. Hence, the first objective of SIB-ESS-C is to cre-
ate metadata for all data products and publish it through a catalog service allowing
users to identify and locate the data resources. This also includes the development
of a Web interface to perform queries against the catalog service. Once a user is
aware of a data resource, access to the data becomes important. Traditionally, data
products have been retrieved by downloading data files from an FTP site. In SDIs
like SIB-ESS-C, web services are deployed for direct data access via Web. In addi-
tion to data access a user may decide to visualize or analyze the dataset of interest.
The SIB-ESS-C system will provide Web-based tools to explore the spatio-temporal
characteristics of the published data products. Other SIB-ESS-C goals include