MOLES3: implementing an ISO standards driven data catalogue

ISO19156 Observations and Measurements (O&M) provides a standardised framework for organising information about the collection of information about the environment. Here we describe the implementation of a specialisation of O&M for environmental data, the Metadata Objects for Linking Environmental Sciences (MOLES3). MOLES3 provides support for organising information about data, and for user navigation around data holdings. The implementation described here, “CEDA-MOLES”, also supports data management functions for the Centre for Environmental Data Archival, CEDA. The previous iteration of MOLES (MOLES2) saw active use over five years, being replaced by CEDA-MOLES in late 2014. During that period important lessons were learnt both about the information needed, as well as how to design and maintain the necessary information systems. In this paper we review the problems encountered in MOLES2; how and why CEDA-MOLES was developed and engineered; the migration of information holdings from MOLES2 to CEDA-MOLES; and, finally, provide an early assessment of MOLES3 (as implemented in CEDA-MOLES) and its limitations. Key drivers for the MOLES3 development included the necessity for improved data provenance, for further structured information to support ISO19115 discovery metadata export (for EU INSPIRE compliance), and to provide appropriate fixed landing pages for Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the presence of evolving datasets. Key lessons learned included the importance of minimising information structure in free text fields, and the necessity to support as much agility in the information infrastructure as possible without compromising on maintainability both by those using the systems internally and externally (e.g. citing in to the information infrastructure), and those responsible for the systems themselves. The migration itself needed to ensure continuity of service and traceability of archived assets

Air transport liberalisation and airport dependency: developing a composite index

Air transport liberalisation in Europe has produced some major changes to the networks operated by airlines and the services available at airports. Within this context the degree of airport dependency in terms of market, spatial and temporal concentration is important to know from an economic geography and risk management perspective. A composite index called the Airport Dependency Index (ADI) is developed to measure airport dependency based on the concept of the relative Gini coefficient. Liberalisation has had varying impacts depending on the size and type of airport and so a comparison is made of the degree of dependency at a large sample of European airports using the ADI. The ADI has the potential to provide insight on the sustainability and worthiness of financing airport projects, and on whether airports should diversify further their activities by investing in the growth and expansion of their network

Remodelling of Cortical Actin Where Lytic Granules Dock at Natural Killer Cell Immune Synapses Revealed by Super-Resolution Microscopy

Super-resolution 3D imaging reveals remodeling of the cortical actin meshwork at the natural killer cell immune synapse, which is likely to be important for secretion of lytic granules

Prognostic model to predict postoperative acute kidney injury in patients undergoing major gastrointestinal surgery based on a national prospective observational cohort study.

Background: Acute illness, existing co-morbidities and surgical stress response can all contribute to postoperative acute kidney injury (AKI) in patients undergoing major gastrointestinal surgery. The aim of this study was prospectively to develop a pragmatic prognostic model to stratify patients according to risk of developing AKI after major gastrointestinal surgery. Methods: This prospective multicentre cohort study included consecutive adults undergoing elective or emergency gastrointestinal resection, liver resection or stoma reversal in 2-week blocks over a continuous 3-month period. The primary outcome was the rate of AKI within 7 days of surgery. Bootstrap stability was used to select clinically plausible risk factors into the model. Internal model validation was carried out by bootstrap validation. Results: A total of 4544 patients were included across 173 centres in the UK and Ireland. The overall rate of AKI was 14·2 per cent (646 of 4544) and the 30-day mortality rate was 1·8 per cent (84 of 4544). Stage 1 AKI was significantly associated with 30-day mortality (unadjusted odds ratio 7·61, 95 per cent c.i. 4·49 to 12·90; P < 0·001), with increasing odds of death with each AKI stage. Six variables were selected for inclusion in the prognostic model: age, sex, ASA grade, preoperative estimated glomerular filtration rate, planned open surgery and preoperative use of either an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor or an angiotensin receptor blocker. Internal validation demonstrated good model discrimination (c-statistic 0·65). Discussion: Following major gastrointestinal surgery, AKI occurred in one in seven patients. This preoperative prognostic model identified patients at high risk of postoperative AKI. Validation in an independent data set is required to ensure generalizability

20-Year Risks of Breast-Cancer Recurrence after Stopping Endocrine Therapy at 5 Years

The administration of endocrine therapy for 5 years substantially reduces recurrence rates during and after treatment in women with early-stage, estrogen-receptor (ER)-positive breast cancer. Extending such therapy beyond 5 years offers further protection but has additional side effects. Obtaining data on the absolute risk of subsequent distant recurrence if therapy stops at 5 years could help determine whether to extend treatment

BADC User Statistics Report 2013

The British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC) came into existence in 1994 to respond to the needs of the Natural Environmental Research Council’s (NERC) desire for a dedicated UK data centre for atmospheric research. Originally the Geophysical Data Facility (GDF), operated by the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC), served less than 200 registered users, from which the BADC’s registered user community has now grown to over 22,500 users. During the intervening period the BADC archive has grown to over 1 Pb. of accessible online data and was amalgamated with the NERC Earth Observation Data Centre (NEODC) in 2005 to form the Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA). This report presents details of the current active user base with a historical review where suitable information was available to the author. The primary sources of information for this review were the user database maintained by CEDA, HTTP and FTP download logs and BADC website access logs. It is hoped that this historical review will help to provide insights into the BADC user community to enable CEDA to continue to provide improved user services primarily targeted towards its core user community, while also enabling support for an ever diversifying user community

Unlocking the full potential of Earth Observation - a presentation of the work of the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO)

A presentation about unlocking the full potential of Earth Observatio

Bringing NCAS data to the masses: CEDA catalogue developments and service intergrations 2017

The Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) hosts an archive of over 180 million files across 5000 data sets. Enabling users to find these data and to ensure NCAS meets its EU Inspire requirements is a fundamental operation of CEDA. Over the last year CEDA has rolled out a number of service updates to aid data discoverability and provide further integration with other CEDA services. The search tool has been changed to include an alternative (Beta) service based on a search engine technology (ElasticSearch) to speed up response times, improve accuracy and search across multiple record types. Other enhancements focus on data management issues such as tagging relationships between data sets and ordering data set lists based on relevance and status. An HTTP API has been added that can retrieve the relevant data set record based on a file or directory path. This approach enables other services to dynamically interrogate the catalogue service to improve automated interactions between CEDA systems. Finally, a new set of bespoke web views have been generated in order to describe AMF data sets, based on campaigns, instruments and long-term facilities

Environmental Data Archival: Practices and Benefits

An overview of the reasons why archiving environmental data properly is an important activity and the benefits to both data suppliers and end users. The talk will give examples from the work of the Centre for Environmental Data Archival at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory which runs both of NERC's British Atmospheric and Earth Observation Data Centres (BADC and NEODC) covering data delivery, archiving, discovery, visualisation and manipulation services at a facility responsible for over 1 Pb of important environmental data

Data journals: building partnerships between publishers and data centres

This presentation discusses the work done by CEDA and the other NERC data centres to interact with journal publsihers for data publication