Sharing Sensor Data with SensorSA and Cascading Sensor Observation Service

The SANY IP consortium (http://www.sany-ip.eu) has recently developed several interesting service prototypes that extend the usability of the Open Geospatial Consortium “Sensor Web Enablement” (OGC SWE) architecture. One such service prototype, developed by the Austrian Research Centers, is the “cascading SOS” (SOS-X). SOS-X is a client to the underlying OGC Sensor Observation service(s) (SOS). It provides alternative access routes to users (or services) interested in accessing data. In addition to a simple cascading, SOS-X can re-format, re-organize, and merge data from several sources into a single SOS offering. Thanks to the built-in “Formula 3” prototype, a kind of time series library, SOS-X will be enabled to derive new data sets on the fly executing arbitrary algebraic operations on one or more data input streams. This article will discuss the SOS-X development status (focusing at end of 2008), further development agenda in year 2009, and possibilities for using the SOS-X outside of the SANY IP

Future internet enablers for VGI applications

This paper presents the authors experiences with the development of mobile Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) applications in the context of the ENVIROFI project and Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP) FP7 research programme.FI-PPP has an ambitious goal of developing a set of Generic FI Enablers (GEs) - software and hardware tools that will simplify development of thematic future internet applications. Our role in the programme was to provide requirements and assess the usability of the GEs from the point of view of the environmental usage area, In addition, we specified and developed three proof of concept implementations of environmental FI applications, and a set of specific environmental enablers (SEs) complementing the functionality offered by GEs. Rather than trying to rebuild the whole infrastructure of the Environmental Information Space (EIS), we concentrated on two aspects: (1) how to assure the existing and future EIS services and applications can be integrated and reused in FI context; and (2) how to profit from the GEs in future environmental applications.This paper concentrates on the GEs and SEs which were used in two of the ENVIROFI pilots which are representative for the emerging class of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) use-cases: one of them is pertinent to biodiversity and another to influence of weather and airborne pollution on users’ wellbeing. In VGI applications, the EIS and SensorWeb overlap with the Social web and potentially huge amounts of information from mobile citizens needs to be assessed and fused with the observations from official sources. On the whole, the authors are confident that the FI-PPP programme will greatly influence the EIS, but the paper also warns of the shortcomings in the current GE implementations and provides recommendations for further developments

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)

Transformations within reach: Pathways to a sustainable and resilient world - Resilient Food Systems

The global spread of COVID-19 is rapidly changing the world as we know it. The pandemic, which is causing loss of life and personal grief, as well as wreaking havoc on health and economic systems, has revealed our global interdependencies and vulnerabilities. Many of the knock-on effects of this crisis are still emerging and will continue to unfold in the coming years. Several countries continue to suffer from increasing infection numbers, while some are slowly emerging from the crisis and taking steps to restart public life and their economies. This report is a contribution to the IIASA-ISC Consultative Science Platform, which seeks to explore the implications of the pandemic for sustainable development pathways. This report summarizes emerging perspectives for building resilient food systems in the wake of COVID-19. Its thematic scope and the recommendations have benefited from three virtual international consultations conducted between June and September 2020 (see Acknowledgments). The summary sections that follow and the main text of this report describe first our global food system and the need for transformation in general before discussing the impacts of the pandemic and exploring how the recovery process can be harnessed to build more resilient, equitable, and sustainable food systems. It is envisaged that the Consultative Platform and the report will stimulate further dialogue to help identify applied research initiatives, which strengthen the knowledge foundation for decision making

Bouncing Forward Sustainably: Pathways to a post-COVID World. Resilient Food Systems

COVID-19 and the global lockdown have triggered a humanitarian and socioeconomic crisis, which threatens to undermine the progress towards eradicating poverty and hunger. We are confronted with a new reality for sustainable development. How food systems will be transformed during the socioeconomic recovery will play an important role in determining whether the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Agreement are still within our reach. COVID-19 exerts supply and demand-based shocks on food systems. The global lockdown to contain the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The economic impact on developing countries is further compounded by depreciation of local currencies, loss of income from remittances and declining prices for export commodities. The impact on supply chains has been heterogeneous, but COVID-19 revealed vulnerabilities in some complex and specialized supply chains, where the link between producer and consumer has been broken. While the outlook for global food supply is strong and the prices for most agricultural commodities have remained stable or even declined, the global lockdown and other containment measures may lead to local constraints in food supply and price spikes. Rising levels of poverty and unemployment have further exacerbated food insecurity in developing and developed countries, particularly in urban areas. Without rapid mitigative action, the pandemic may double the number of people at risk of dying from acute hunger, threatening severe famines in vulnerable countries. Recovery from global lockdown requires an emphasis on building more resilient food systems. COVID-19 reinforces the need to rebalance the focus on economic efficiency of our global food system with a greater emphasis on resilience and social and environmental sustainability. Strategic decisions taken during the economic recovery phase, signals sent by policies and fiscal policy packages have the potential to lock-in development pathways for the coming years. The following considerations should be taken into account when structuring the recovery process: i) expanding social safety nets to ensure food and nutritional security; ii) assessing systemic risks in food systems and the role of trade and self-sufficiency; iii) advancing innovation and the adoption of sustainable technologies and practices; and iv) strengthening the accounting and management of natural capital. A comprehensive approach to COVID-19 recovery and sustainable development demands further emphasis on interdisciplinary cooperation and systems thinking. It requires also a strengthening of the science policy interface, so that feed-back loops between impacts and scenario analysis, fact-based policy design, and implementation are improved. Coupled with an emphasis on open data and information access, important scientific contributions to decision making processes include: i) strengthening near real time monitoring capabilities across the development and environmental dimensions of food systems; and ii) providing integrated assessments of the implications of strategic choices for sustainable development pathways in a post COVID-19 world

Building Environmental Semantic Web Applications with Drupal

Part 4: Semantics and EnvironmentInternational audienceEfforts required for publishing information as Linked Data often appears too high compared to obvious and immediate benefits. Consequently, only a tiny fraction of the web can be easily used as a semantic ”database” today. Drupal 7 changes the rules of the game by integrating the functionality required for structuring and semantically annotating arbitrary content types in the Drupal “core”, as well as encouraging the module authors to use this functionality in their Drupal extensions. This paper presents the authors recent experiences with strengths and shortcomings of the Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 semantic web extensions, and discusses feasibility of the future semantic web environmental applications based on a Drupal platform. The intention of the paper is (1) to analyse the state of the art in semantic web support, as well as the potentials for further development in Drupal today; (2) to prove the feasibility of Drupal based semantic web applications for environmental usage area; and (3) to introduce the idea of Drupal as a rapid prototyping development environment