Earth Science Informatics - Overview

Over the last 10-15 years, significant advances have been made in information management, there are an increasing number of individuals entering the field of information management as it applies to Geoscience and Remote Sensing data, and the field of informatics has come to its own. Informatics is the science and technology of applying computers and computational methods to the systematic analysis, management, interchange, and representation of science data, information, and knowledge. Informatics also includes the use of computers and computational methods to support decision making and applications. Earth Science Informatics (ESI, a.k.a. geoinformatics) is the application of informatics in the Earth science domain. ESI is a rapidly developing discipline integrating computer science, information science, and Earth science. Major national and international research and infrastructure projects in ESI have been carried out or are on-going. Notable among these are: the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), the European Commissions INSPIRE, the U.S. NSDI and Geospatial One-Stop, the NASA EOSDIS, and the NSF DataONE, EarthCube and Cyberinfrastructure for Geoinformatics. More than 18 departments and agencies in the U.S. federal government have been active in Earth science informatics. All major space agencies in the world, have been involved in ESI research and application activities. In the United States, the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), whose membership includes nearly 150 organizations (government, academic and commercial) dedicated to managing, delivering and applying Earth science data, has been working on many ESI topics since 1998. The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS)s Working Group on Information Systems and Services (WGISS) has been actively coordinating the ESI activities among the space agencies. Remote Sensing; Earth Science Informatics, Data Systems; Data Services; Metadat

NASA's Earth Science Data Systems

NASA's Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Program has evolved over the last two decades, and currently has several core and community components. Core components provide the basic operational capabilities to process, archive, manage and distribute data from NASA missions. Community components provide a path for peer-reviewed research in Earth Science Informatics to feed into the evolution of the core components. The Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) is a core component consisting of twelve Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) and eight Science Investigator-led Processing Systems spread across the U.S. The presentation covers how the ESDS Program continues to evolve and benefits from as well as contributes to advances in Earth Science Informatics

Geospatial Standards and the Knowledge Generation Lifescycle

Standards play an essential role at each stage in the sequence of processes by which knowledge is generated from geoscience observations, simulations and analysis. This paper provides an introduction to the field of informatics and the knowledge generation lifecycle in the context of the geosciences. In addition we discuss how the newly formed Earth Science Informatics Technical Committee is helping to advance the application of standards and best practices to make data and data systems more usable and interoperable

The implementation of international geospatial standards for earth and space sciences

The Earth and Space Sciences Informatics division of European Geosciences Union (EGU) and the Open Geospatial Consortium jointly organised a special event entitled: 'Implementation of international geospatial standards for earth and space sciences event' - at the EGU General Assembly meeting held in Vienna, April 2009. The event objectives included: (a) to discuss the integration of information systems from different geosciences disciplines; (b) to promote and discuss the present process to scale from specific and monolithic systems towards independent and modular enabling infrastructures - forming an earth system science (ESS) infrastructure; and (c) to show some of the latest advances in implementing open standards. This manuscript introduces the event motivations and describes the abstract and holistic framework, which can be used to situate the topics and the developments presented by the event speakers. This manuscript introduces important, and relatively new technologies to build a multi-disciplinary geosciences information system: the System of Systems approach and the Model Driven Approach. To achieve that, three important information infrastructure categories are recognised: (a) ESS information infrastructure; (b) geospatial information infrastructure; and (c) distributed information infrastructure. Digital Earth should support the discussed framework to accelerate information transfer from theoretical discussions to applications, in all fields related to global climate change, natural disaster prevention and response, new energy-source development, agricultural and food security, and urban planning and management

Design and Implementation of an Archetype Based Interoperable Knowledge Eco-system for Data Buoys

This paper describes the ongoing work of the authors in translating two-level system design techniques used in Health Informatics to the Earth Systems Science domain. Health informaticians have developed a sophisticated two-level systems design approach for electronic health documentation over many years, and with the use of archetypes, have shown how knowledge interoperability among heterogeneous systems can be achieved. Translating two-level modelling techniques to a new domain is a complex task. A proof-of-concept archetype enabled data buoy eco-system is presented. The concept of operational templates-as-a service is proposed. Design recommendations and implementation experiences of re-working the proposed architecture to run on ultra-resource constrained data buoy platforms using templates-as-service are described

Towards a Digital Earth: Using Archetypes to Enable Knowledge Interoperability within Geo-Observational Sensor Systems Design

Earth System Science (ESS) observational data are often inadequately semantically enriched by geo-observational information systems in order to capture the true meaning of the associated data sets. Data models underpinning these information systems are often too rigid in their data representation to allow for the ever-changing and evolving nature of ESS domain concepts. This impoverished approach to observational data representation reduces the ability of multi-disciplinary practitioners to share information in a computable way. Object oriented techniques typically employed to model data in a complex domain (with evolving domain concepts) can unnecessarily exclude domain specialists from the design process, invariably leading to a mismatch between the needs of the domain specialists, and how the concepts are modelled. In many cases, an over simplification of the domain concept is captured by the computer scientist. This paper proposes that two-level modelling methodologies developed by Health Informaticians to tackle similar problems of specific domain use-case knowledge modelling can be re-used within ESS Informatics. A proposed methodology to re-use two-level modelling within geo-observational sensor systems is described. We show how the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) Observations & Measurements (O&M) standard can act as a pragmatic solution for a stable reference-model (necessary for two-level modelling), and upon which more volatile domain specific concepts can be defined and managed using archetypes. A use-case is presented, followed by a worked example showing the implementation methodology and considerations leading to an O&M based, two-level modelling design approach, to realise semantically rich and interoperable Earth System Science based geo-observational sensor systems

Ontology For Europe's Space Situational Awareness Program

This paper presents an ontology architecture concept for the European Space Agency‘s (ESA) Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Program. It incorporates the author‘s domain ontology, The Space Situational Awareness Ontology and related ontology work. I summarize computational ontology, discuss the segments of ESA SSA, and introduce an option for a modular ontology framework reflecting the divisionsof the SSA program. Among other things, ontologies are used for data sharing and integration. By applying ontology to ESA data, the ESA may better achieve its integration and innovation goals, while simultaneously improving the state of peaceful SSA