Description of Environment: Ecoinformatics Track
Note: There are two Sub-Tracks: A and B
Environmental data is dispersed around the world in government, academic and private organizations. While the data may play an important purpose in its original location, environmental actions, policies, regulations, and laws can be better considered and more effective if the information is accessed, reported, shared, and disseminated. All of the registries that are the focus of this Open Forum are or will be widely utilized by organizations that generate, manage and use environmental information. This track has presentations showing the state-of-the-art in utilizing these technologies separately and in combination. In addition to describing the use of the technologies and attempts to use them in a cooperative/interoperable manner, this track highlights collaborations between federal and state agencies, academia, private firms and individuals.
Technology highlights: In this track, you will hear about
The environment track is broken out into two sub-tracks in order to cover a broader range of ongoing efforts. Both tracks cover cooperative projects between governmental levels --local, tribal, state, national, and international. Both tracks also include discussion and demonstration of many of the technologies that are the focus of this Open Forum, along with other emerging technologies. The sub-tracks are:
Environment: Econformatics
Track A
The technologies described above tie into a wide variety of environmental actions and programs. Key to effective integration will be development of shared tools such as data dictionaries, data registries, ontologies, and taxonomies. This Track highlights the research, development, demonstration, and implementation of tools such as the EDEN Inland Water (EDEN IW), ReportNet and it's suite of tools for exchange and harmonization of environmental data, the Environmental Data Registry (EDR), a prototype XML registry and other technologies. Most of the registries covered in this Open Forum are actively operated for the environmental protection information systems and are described and demonstrated here. For some, there is enough experience to discuss Abest practices@, others are at the leading edge, where we are trying to gain the benefits of new technologies.
For the European case, emphasis lies on bridging the heterogeneity of the various environmental monitoring and reporting systems in the many countries. Stepwise and topic area by topic area, data is been reported to the European and international bodies in a consistent and harmonized form. In agreeing on elements of a shared European Environmental Information Infrastructure, underpinning a common European system of environmental information exchange, many similarities to the US situation can be identified. Since e.g. the XML standards are global the nature of the solutions are increasingly global as well.
Environment: Ecoinformatics
Track B:
Biology Information
Infrastructure
Dissemination of and access to biological information, particularly information related to the identification and naming of organisms and biodiversity, has gained new interest. A staggering fact is that still today, we have names for less than 2 million organisms out of an estimated 10 million. This is largely because information sharing in taxonomic classification research has traditionally experienced a slow rate of discovery, partly due to low investment in the field. Current activities promise to improve this situation. The Global Biological Information Facility, Species 2000, and Integrated Taxonomic Information System are examples of efforts that are addressing these problems. A global registry of names of known organisms is being developed and together with collaboration mechanisms, information interchange standards, and techniques for linking taxonomic information, this work will form a new information infrastructure for biodiversity. The Open Forum provides an ideal platform for the biodiversity community to compare its approaches with those of related disciplines. The aim of this track is to review the current status of development of a common information infrastructure, to discuss the challenges, and to evaluate opportunities.
ASTSWMO States and Data Sharing
The EPA Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response is working with states and Indian tribes on data sharing efforts, identifying and demonstrating technologies that can assist in data sharing. This includes work with members of the Association of State and Territorial Solid Waste Management Officials (ASTSWMO). Several projects are demonstrating the use of metadata registries, terminology, data standards, and the management of semantics. In addition to facilitating the development of well formed data designs, this work addresses variations in terms that are used in different localities to describe similar situations. Even using a common language (English), there are terminological differences that are similar to those encountered in multi-language situations.
Homeland Security
Following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, many jurisdictions (Federal, state, local) were called upon to do sampling and monitoring and to report the results to a central source for analysis. The problem was not in collecting the data and bringing the information together, the problem was making sense of that data which contained many chemical names and code sets for the same chemical element, different measurement units, different sampling methodologies and diverse data representations. Mistakes were made that were costly. Likewise, in the public access/citizen right-to-know arena, new Web technologies have opened portals to environmental information dispersed throughout many organizations, but pulling information together does not mean that it will be understandable. As in the case of the World Trade Center, if different systems call things by different names, measure things differently, and incompatibly represent data, comparisons and analysis are difficult. Coherence cannot be achieved though immediate, global conversion to unary data standards. We must deal with diversity and chart a migration path toward coherence, consistency, and quality. We must take into account diverse languages, terminology schemes, data representations. We must make data understandable to users by interpreting, mapping, and translating the data into understandable contexts.
This track covers cooperative projects between various levels of government and private enterprise to share environmental information.