Linked Open Data in the Global Change Information System (GCIS)

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (http://globalchange.gov) coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The USGCRP is developing a Global Change Information System (GCIS) that will centralize access to data and information related to global change across the U.S. federal government. The first implementation will focus on the 2013 National Climate Assessment (NCA) . (http://assessment.globalchange.gov) The NCA integrates, evaluates, and interprets the findings of the USGCRP; analyzes the effects of global change on the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity; and analyzes current trends in global change, both human-induced and natural, and projects major trends for the subsequent 25 to 100 years. The NCA has received over 500 distinct technical inputs to the process, many of which are reports distilling and synthesizing even more information, coming from thousands of individuals around the federal, state and local governments, academic institutions and non-governmental organizations. The GCIS will present a web-based version of the NCA including annotations linking the findings and content of the NCA with the scientific research, datasets, models, observations, etc. that led to its conclusions. It will use semantic tagging and a linked data approach, assigning globally unique, persistent, resolvable identifiers to all of the related entities and capturing and presenting the relationships between them, both internally and referencing out to other linked data sources and back to agency data centers. The developing W3C PROV Data Model and ontology will be used to capture the provenance trail and present it in both human readable web pages and machine readable formats such as RDF and SPARQL. This will improve visibility into the assessment process, increase understanding and reproducibility, and ultimately increase credibility and trust of the resulting report. Building on the foundation of the NCA, longer term plans for the GCIS include extending these capabilities throughout the U.S. Global Change Research Program, centralizing access to global change data and information across the thirteen agencies that comprise the program

Conceptual Approach of Regional Problem of the Global Climate Change?

The Earth’s climate system is the consequence of a complex interplay between external solar forces and the internal interactions of atmosphere, oceans, land surface, biosphere and cryosphere. Human activity is a potential factor influencing change in the global system by altering the chemical composition of atmospheric concentrations of powerful greenhouse gases, mainly CO2 and CH4. How and what should be undertaken to minimize such impact? Space-based technology is, to a point, able to accurately observe and sense the whole Earthly system and to understand the processes involved in the Earth’s climate. This suggests the following projects; to document and understand the interrelation between Sun and Earth as an external force acting on the Earth’s climate and also to seek a better understanding of the Earth’s intricately linked internal processes including those of global water, energy and carbon cycles. Together, advances in computing and information systems technologies, and modern techniques in data assimilation, diagnostic and prediction models, all provide a powerful combination of tools for understanding the Earth’s system and applying knowledge and tools to the management of natural resources and mitigation of natural hazards. Cooperation can likely be developed within the framework of existing programmers. There is no doubt that contributions to climate change are on a global scale, necessitating the engagement of states and international institutions: the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) programme - a joint initiative of the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA), is designed to establish a European capacity for the provision and use of operational information for global monitoring of the environment. And the United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response – UN-SPIDER - is another opportunity for the enhancement of the above-mentioned projects for the establishment of international cooperation

Penilaian Kerentanan Pantai menggunakan Metode Integrasi CVI-MCA Studi Kasus Pantai Indramayu

The increasing of sea level due to climate change has been focused many research activities in order to know the coastal response to the change, and determine the important variables which have contribution to the coastal change. This paper presents a method for integrating Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI), Multi Criteria Analysis (MCA) method and Geographic Information-System (GIS) technology to map the coastal vulnerability. The index is calculated based-on six variables: coastal erosion, geomorphology, slope, significant wave height, sea level change and tidal range. Emphasize has been made to the methodological aspect, essentially which is linked to: (i) the use of GIS technique for constructing, interpolation, filtering and resampling the data for shoreline grid, (ii) the standardization each rank of variables (0-1) and the use of several percentile (20%, 40%, 60%, and 80%) for each rank score, and (iii) the use of variable’s rank to map the relative (local) and standard (global) vulnerability of the coastline. The result show that for local, the index consist of four categories: very high (19.61%), high (68.63%), moderate (1,96%), and low (9.80%). Meanwhile, for global level, the index is constantly in low category

Simit: A Language for Physical Simulation

Using existing programming tools, writing high-performance simulation code is labor intensive and requires sacrificing readability and portability. The alternative is to prototype simulations in a high-level language like Matlab, thereby sacrificing performance. The Matlab programming model naturally describes the behavior of an entire physical system using the language of linear algebra. However, simulations also manipulate individual geometric elements, which are best represented using linked data structures like meshes. Translating between the linked data structures and linear algebra comes at significant cost, both to the programmer and the machine. High-performance implementations avoid the cost by rephrasing the computation in terms of linked or index data structures, leaving the code complicated and monolithic, often increasing its size by an order of magnitude. In this paper, we present Simit, a new language for physical simulations that lets the programmer view the system both as a linked data structure in the form of a hypergraph, and as a set of global vectors, matrices and tensors depending on what is convenient at any given time. Simit provides a novel assembly construct that makes it conceptually easy and computationally efficient to move between the two abstractions. Using the information provided by the assembly construct, the compiler generates efficient in-place computation on the graph. We demonstrate that Simit is easy to use: a Simit program is typically shorter than a Matlab program; that it is high-performance: a Simit program running sequentially on a CPU performs comparably to hand-optimized simulations; and that it is portable: Simit programs can be compiled for GPUs with no change to the program, delivering 5-25x speedups over our optimized CPU code

Climate change is catchy – but when will it really hurt?

Concern and general awareness about the impacts of climate change in all sectors of the social- ecological-economic system is growing as a result of improved climate science products and information, as well as increased media coverage of the apparent manifestations of the phenomenon in our society. However, scales of climate variability and change, in space and time, are often confused and so  attribution of impacts on various sectors, including the health sector, can be misunderstood and  misrepresented. In this review, we assess the mechanistic links between climate and infectious  diseases in particular, and consider how this relationship varies, and may vary according to different time scales, especially for aetiologically climate-linked diseases. While climate varies in the medium (inter- annual) time frame, this variability itself may be oscillating and/or trending on cyclical and long-term (climate change) scales because of regional and global scale climate phenomena such as the El-Niño southern oscillation coupled with global-warming drivers of  climate change. As several studies have shown, quantifying and modelling these linkages and associations at appropriate time and space scales is both necessary and increasingly feasible with improved climate science products and better epidemiological data. The application of this approach is considered for South Africa, and the need for a more concerted effort in this regard is supported

Modern Trends and Prospects for the Development of Russian Healthcare: The Role of Digital Technologies

Health care as an open system is affected by external fluctuations: the processes of globalization, digitalization and informatization; modernization and virtualization; increasing complexity of problems and volumes of information; increasing share of qualified, creative work; challenges and threats of the future, increasing social tension and devaluation of values. All this leads to a change in the management paradigm, which is based on future management, advanced development, self-education and self-development. Data analysis of VTSIOM secondary sociological studies and author’s analysis of the content of discussions from August 2018- to February 2019 of medical professionals ’online communities were conducted. The study has identified the following current trends: the growth of informatization, virtualization, the emergence of new medical technologies, the formation of the global medical market, the change in the management paradigm of public and non-profit health organizations, the formation of new requirements for managers and staff of medical organizations. Global trends are linked to the growing popularity of digital healthcare. Medical institutions, diagnostic laboratories and insurance companies are gradually getting involved in the digitalization process and creating a single electronic system. This task is included in the National strategy for the development of artificial intelligence in Russia. The study has fixed that the problem of accessibility and quality of medical care in the country remains relevant, which is confirmed by the data of independent sociological studies. The main risks of digital medicine development are data security and insufficient professional competence of medical personnel in the field of information technology. It is important to support the processes the of users number of medical relevant social networks: iVrach.com, imedicina.ru, vrachirf.ru, doctocnarabote.ru, novmed.net, medtusovka.ru, doctornet.ru as well as consolidation of Russian technology companies in developing their own up-to-date software products for digital medicine. Keywords: Digital Healthcare; digital technologies; quality of medical services, telemedicine, Russian healthcare, risks of digitalization Introductio

Modelling soil organic carbon stocks in global change scenarios: a CarboSOIL application

Global climate change, as a consequence of the increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 concentration, may significantly affect both soil organic C storage and soil capacity for C sequestration. CarboSOIL is an empirical model based on regression techniques and developed as a geographical information system tool to predict soil organic carbon (SOC) contents at different depths. This model is a new component of the agro-ecological decision support system for land evaluation MicroLEIS, which assists decision-makers in facing specific agro-ecological problems, particularly in Mediterranean regions. In this study, the CarboSOIL model was used to study the effects of climate change on SOC dynamics in a Mediterranean region (Andalusia, S Spain). Different downscaled climate models were applied based on BCCR-BCM2, CNRMCM3, and ECHAM5 and driven by SRES scenarios (A1B, A2 and B2). Output data were linked to spatial data sets (soil and land use) to quantify SOC stocks. The CarboSOIL model has proved its ability to predict the short-medium- and long-term trends (2040s, 2070s and 2100s) of SOC dynamics and sequestration under projected future scenarios of climate change. Results have shown an overall trend towards decreasing of SOC stocks in the upper soil sections (0–25 cm and 25–50 cm) for most soil types and land uses, but predicted SOC stocks tend to increase in the deeper soil section (0–75 cm). Soil types as Arenosols, Planosols and Solonchaks and land uses as “permanent crops” and “open spaces with little or no vegetation” would be severely affected by climate change with large decreases of SOC stocks, in particular under the medium–high emission scenario A2 by 2100. The information developed in this study might support decision-making in land management and climate adaptation strategies in Mediterranean regions, and the methodology could be applied to other Mediterranean areas with available soil, land use and climate data.Ministerio de Economía y CompetitividadJunta de Andalucí

Action-based flood forecasting for triggering humanitarian action

Too often, credible scientific early warning information of increased disaster risk does not result in humanitarian action. With financial resources tilted heavily towards response after a disaster, disaster managers have limited incentive and ability to process complex scientific data, including uncertainties. These incentives are beginning to change, with the advent of several new Forecast-based Financing systems that provide funding based on a forecast of an extreme event. Given the changing landscape, here we demonstrate a method to select and use appropriate forecasts for specific humanitarian disaster prevention actions, even in a data-scarce location. This action-based forecasting methodology takes into account the parameters of each action, such as action lifetime, when verifying a forecast. Forecasts are linked with action based on an understanding of (1) the magnitude of previous flooding events and (2) the willingness to act "in vain" for specific actions. This is applied in the context of the Uganda Red Cross Society Forecast-based Financing pilot project, with forecasts from the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS). Using this method, we define the "danger level" of flooding, and we select the probabilistic forecast triggers that are appropriate for specific actions. Results from this methodology can be applied globally across hazards, and fed into a financing system that ensures that automatic, pre-funded early action will be triggered by forecasts

DEIMS-SDR – A web portal to document research sites and their associated data

Climate change and other drivers are affecting ecosystems around the globe. In order to enable a better understanding of ecosystem functioning and to develop mitigation and adaptation strategies in response to environmental change, a broad range of information, including in-situ observations of both biotic and abiotic parameters, needs to be considered. Access to sufficient and well documented in-situ data from long term observations is therefore one of the key requirements for modelling and assessing the effects of global change on ecosystems. Usually, such data is generated by multiple providers; often not openly available and with improper documentation. In this regard, metadata plays an important role in aiding the findability, accessibility and reusability of data as well as enabling reproducibility of the results leading to management decisions. This metadata needs to include information on the observation location and the research context. For this purpose we developed the Dynamic Ecological Information Management System – Site and Dataset Registry (DEIMS-SDR), a research and monitoring site registry (https://www.deims.org/) that not only makes it possible to describe in-situ observation or experimentation sites, generating persistent, unique and resolvable identifiers for each site, but also to document associated data linked to each site. This article describes the system architecture and illustrates the linkage of contextual information to observational data. The aim of DEIMS-SDR is to be a globally comprehensive site catalogue describing a wide range of sites, providing a wealth of information, including each site's location, ecosystems, facilities, measured parameters and research themes and enabling that standardised information to be openly available

Development of soil and terrain digital database for major food-growing regions of India for resource planning

Soil information system in SOTER (soil and terrain digital database) framework is developed for the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) and black soil regions (BSR) of India with the help of information from 842 georeferenced soil profiles including morphological, physical and chemical properties of soils in addition to the site characteristics and climatic information. The database has information from 82 climatic stations that can be linked with the other datasets. The information from this organized database can be easily retrieved for use and is compatible with the global database. The database can be updated with recent and relevant data as and when they are available. The database has many applications such as inputs for refinement of agro-ecological regions and sub-regions, studies on carbon sequestration, land evaluation and land (crop) planning, soil erosion, soil quality, carbon and crop modelling and other climate change related research. This warehouse of information in a structured framework can be used as a data bank for posterity