Big Data Breaking Barriers – First step on a long trail

Most data sets and streams have a geospatial component. Some people even claim that about 80% of all data is related to location. In the era of Big Data this number might even be underestimated, as data sets interrelate and initially non-spatial data becomes indirectly geo-referenced. The optimal treatment of Big Data thus requires advanced methods and technologies for handling the geospatial aspects in data storage, processing, pattern recognition, prediction, visualisation and exploration. On the one hand, our work exploits earth and environmental sciences for existing interoperability standards, and the foundational data structures, algorithms and software that are required to meet these geospatial information handling tasks. On the other hand, we are concerned with the arising needs to combine human analysis capacities (intelligence augmentation) with machine power (artificial intelligence). This paper provides an overview of the emerging landscape and outlines our (Digital Earth) vision for addressing the upcoming issues. We particularly request the projection and re-use of the existing environmental, earth observation and remote sensing expertise in other sectors, i.e. to break the barriers of all of these silos by investigating integrated applications.JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat

Shaping digital earth applications through open innovation – setting the scene for a digital earth living lab

Science and policy increasingly request for sustainable development and growth. Similarly, Digital Earth undergoes a paradigm shift to an open platform that actively supports user engagement. While the public becomes able to contribute new content, we recognize a gap in user-driven validation, feedback and requirements capture, and innovative application development. Rather than defining Digital Earth applications top down, we see a need for methods and tools that will help building applications bottom up and driven by community needs. These should include a technology toolbox of geospatial and environmental enablers, which allow to access functional building blocks and content in multiple ways, but – equally important – enable the collaboration within partially unknown stakeholder networks. The validation and testing in real-life scenarios will be a central requirement when approaching the Digital Earth 2020 goals, which were articulated recently. We particularly argue to follow a Living Lab approach for co-creation and awareness rising in relation to environmental and geospatial matters. We explain why and how such a Digital Earth Living Lab could lead to a sustainable approach for developing, deploying, and using Digital Earth applications and suggest a paradigm shift for Virtual Globes becoming forums for research and innovation

Multi-sensory Integration for a Digital Earth Nervous System

The amount of geospatial data is increasing, but interoperability issues hinder integrated discovery, view and analysis. This paper suggests an illustrative and extensible solution to some of the underlying challenges, by extending a previously suggested Digital Earth Nervous System with multi-sensory integration capacities. In doing so, it proposes the combination of multiple ways of sensing our environment with a memory for storing relevant data sets and integration methods for extracting valuable information out of the rich inputs. Potential building blocks for the implementation of such an advanced nervous system are sketched and briefly analysed. The paper stimulates more detailed considerations by concluding with challenges for future research and requesting a multidisciplinary development approach – including computer sciences, environmental sciences, cognitive and neurosciences, as well as engineering.JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat

Survey report: data management in Citizen Science projects

A Citizen Science and Smart City Summit, organised by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in 2014, identified the management of citizen-collected data as a major barrier to the re-usability and integration of these contributions across borders. We followed up on these find-ings with a Citizen Science survey, experiments on a repository for EU-funded Citizen Science projects, and discussions with the European and international Citizen Science community. This report summarises the outcomes of the survey. Amongst other findings, the 121 responses clearly underlined the diversity of projects in terms of topicality, funding mechanisms and geographic coverage, but also provided valuable insights relat-ed to the access and re-use conditions of project results. While, for example, 60% of the participat-ing projects follow a dedicated data management plan and a majority of projects provides access to raw or aggregated data, the exact use conditions are not always put into place or miss well-defined licenses. Apart from replies from all across the globe, this activity also helped us to connect to the relevant players. Discussions on data management in support of Citizen Science could already be initiated with representatives of the European, American and Australian Citizen Science associations.JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat

I am ...

This lesson focuses on understand the Farmers’ Alliance, Women of the Farmers’ Alliance, the Colored Alliance and the Knights of Labor. Students will learn about the objectives of each alliance and why each alliance was important to the formation of the third party, the populist movement. Students will also understand the historic figures of the Farmers’ Alliance, Women of the Farmers’ Alliance and the Knights of Labor. Students will understand the historic figures lives and contributions to the above organizations of the gilded age.https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/gilded_age/1012/thumbnail.jp

Open Environmental Platforms: Top-Level Components and Relevant Standards

We present our ideas of an open Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platform for monitoring, mapping and managing our environment. The envisioned solution bridges the gap between the Internet of Things, Content and Services, and highly specific applications, such as oil spill detection or marine monitoring. On the one hand, this environmental platform should be open to new technologies; on the other hand, it has to provide open standard interfaces to various application domains. We identify core components, standards, and needs for new standard development in ICT for environment. We briefly outline how our past and present activities contribute to the development of the desired open environmental platform. Future implementations shall contribute to sustainable developments in the environmental domain.JRC.DDG.H.6-Spatial data infrastructure

Exploring legitimization strategies for contested uses of citizen-generated data for policy

In this article, we investigate how citizens use data they gather as a rhetorical resource for demanding environmental policy interventions and advancing environmental justiceclaims. While producing citizen-generated data (CGD) can be regarded as a form of ‘social protest’, citizens and interested institutional actors still have to ‘justify’ the role of lay people in producing data on environmental issues. Such actors adopt a variety of arguments to persuade public authorities to recognize CGD as a legitimate resource for policy making and regulation. So far, scant attention has been devoted to inspecting the different legitimization strategies adopted to push for institutional use of CGD. In order to fill this knowledge gap, we examine which distinctive strategies are adopted by interested actors: existing legitimization arguments are clustered, and strategies are outlined, based on a literature review and exemplary cases. We explore the conceivable effects of these strategies on targeted policy uses. Two threads emerge from the research, entailing two complementary arguments: namely that listening to CGD is a governmental obligation and that including CGD is ultimately beneficial for making environmental decisions. We conclude that the most used strategies include showing the scientific strength and contributory potential of CGD, whereas environmental rights and democracy-based strategies are still rare. We discuss why we consider this result to be problematic and outline a future research agenda

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)