Environment:
Ecoinformatics - Track B
Plenary session. See Environmental Informatics
Sub-track A
10:00 - 10:30
Break
10:30 -
Plenary session. See Environmental Informatics Sub-track A
Noon - 2 PM
Lunch
2:00-
2:00 - 2:10 PM,
Welcome
Gail Hodge
Information International Associates
Stefan Jensen
European Environment Agency
Session Title: Components of an Information Infrastructure
for Biological Information Networks
This session will
discuss the various architectures, models and interchange technologies that are
being developed to promote the sharing of taxonomic and biodiversity
information. Many of these approaches
involve federated databases, community portals, and shared registries.
2:10
- 2:50 PM, Information Architecture of the Global Biological Information
Facility
Deputy
Director, Informatics
Global
Biological Information Facility
The Global
Biological Information Facility will be an interoperable network of
biodiversity databases and information technology tools that will enable users
to locate, navigate and use large quantities of diverse biodiversity data from
many sources within a framework of proprietary rights and due attribution. Key to this effort is the development of a
catalog of known organisms and various standards and protocols for
interoperability. The architecture of
GBIF will be described along with the work on interoperability protocols and
the use of e-business models such as UDDI in support of biological
interchange.
2:50
- 3:30 PM, Interoperability Mechanisms for Taxonomic Databases
Andrew
Jones
Species
2000
This project is part
of Species 2000, a project to enumerate all known species as a baseline for the
study of biodiversity on a global scale. The SPICE for Species 2000 project has
developed a federated architecture for creating and maintaining this catalogue
of life. In SPICE autonomous GSDs (Global Species Databases), each covering a distinct
taxonomic sector, are linked in an architecture to create a catalogue of life.
The data model (metadata) of this architecture will be presented along with the
mechanisms for accessing the species information. Techniques used to ensure the architecture is
scalable and capable of providing a stable service supporting the aims of
Species 2000 will be discussed.
Paper by AC Jones
(1), WA Gray (1), FA Bisby (2), RJ White (3)
(1) Cardiff University,
Department of Computer Science Andrew.C.Jones@cs.cardiff.ac.uk
W.A.Gray@cs.cardiff.ac.uk
(2) The University
of Reading, Centre for Plant Diversity & Systematics
F.A.Bisby@reading.ac.uk
(3) Southampton
University, School of Biological Sciences R.J.White@soton.ac.uk
3:30 - 4:00 PM
Break
4:00-
Session Title: Components of an Information
Infrastructure (continued)
Donna Roy
National
Biological Information Infrastructure/US Geological Survey
The National Biological Information
Infrastructure is a
Gerard Cunningham
(cancelled)
United Nations
Environmental Program
The United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP) provides leadership and encourages partnership in caring for the
environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to
improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations.
It is this reality that led UNEP to initiate the UNEP.Net partnership in
September 2000, so as to bring these specialized scientific environment
communities together under one umbrella. The partnership is using the
communities' varied and vast information resources to begin a new global
process of developing integrated solutions to well-known environment problems
while also highlighting emerging issues by using relevant components of their
scientific information holdings. UNEP is thus fulfilling a part of its mandate
by bringing together environmental information and data providers and
facilitating and encouraging the exchange of information between them by using
the most current Internet technologies to serve the world's environment citizens.
DAY 4 -
Link to Track Descriptions
Environment:
Ecoinformatics - Track B
Session Title: Terminology and Metadata
for Biological Information Networks
Metadata standards support the description, management and re-use of
biological information. Content standards, including the use of
terminology registries to link variant biological names to one another and provide
preferred terminology, are being developed through a variety of partnerships.
8:30
- 9:15 AM, Developing a Registry of Taxonomic Names: The ITIS Experience
Dr.
Michael Ruggiero
ITIS/ US Geological Survey
The Integrated
Taxonomic Information System, a coalition of
Jessica Milstead
Jelem Company
In mid-2001, CSA (formerly Cambridge Scientific Abstracts) began a project to
create a controlled vocabulary to support its Biocomplexity-related
databases as well as the needs of the National Biological Information
Infrastructure. This project involved the selection, merger and integration of
a variety of previously constructed vocabularies in the life sciences,
environmental science, aquatic sciences and sociology. This presentation
describes the process, the challenges and how the results will be used in
metadata creation and resource discovery.
10:00 - 10:30
Break
10:30 -
Dr. William Michener
LTERnet
LTERnet develops and promotes standards and terminologies for exchange of information across the network of Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites. Standardization efforts, including the historical development of the Ecological Metadata Language and supporting software will be described. The integration of formal metadata into future knowledge environments will be discussed.
Co-authors: William Michener & James Brunt (Long-Term Ecological Research Network Office, Dept. of Biology, University of New Mexico) and Matt Jones & Chad Berkley (National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California-Santa Barbara).
David A. Vieglais
The
http://sourceforge.net/projects/digir.
Distributed Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR) is a client/server protocol for retrieving information from distributed resources using HTTP as the transport protocol and XML for message encoding. It is an open source project hosted by Source Forge with a global distribution of contributors and users. DiGIR, originally developed as a replacement for the Z39.50 protocol for the Species Analyst natural history specimen information network, is intended to work with any type of information that can be described with an XML-Schema document. DiGIR information providers are registered in a public UDDI registry.This presentation will focus on the integration of DiGIR with the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK), an NSF funded project to produce a distributed information and computation environment for the use and analysis of ecological knowledge.
Lunch
2:00 - 2:45 PM, Environmental Data Sharing--Metadata Associated with Environmental Measurements in
STORET
Cary McElhinney, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, HQ
Marty McComb Environmental Protection Agency, Region
VIII
STORET
is an EPA maintained database of water, soil, sediment, air, and biological
measurement data. The system was
modernized by the EPA Office of Water in 1998 and is now a distributed Oracle
database that allows federal, state, tribal, and local users to manage their
data using an identical database structure.
STORET places a huge emphasis on metadata and allows users to document
the quality of their results by tracking things such as sample collection
procedures, QAPP summaries, sampling gear, and gear configurations. This presentation will explore the way in
which metadata is organized in STORET and how that information, once archived,
can increase the value of the data for secondary analyses.
Prof. Dr.
Environmental
Saarland State
University
Metadata is often
identified as a tool to preserve data (documentation) and to make data
available to remote end users. In this context, data semantics (the metadata description)
and data exploration (metadata registries) are important issues discussed in
the community. Most of these discussions seem to have been user centered in the
past. Environmental Informatics Group (EIG) has been building large scale
integrated information systems, many of them in the environmental domain, since
1990. We came to the issue of metadata because we were integrating systems and
building intelligent software which is accessing the integrated system on
behalf of end users. Therefore, our view has always been a view of
inter-operability and collaboration of systems. Such interoperability is only
possible thorough the use of built-in metadata. The presentation will
concentrate on this integration view and will present (up to) 5 case studies of
real world integrated metadata networks. Hopefully, lessons may be learnt for
the inter-operability of metadata registries.
Break
4:00 - 4:45 PM, OSWER Electronic Data Projects
Andy Crossland
Environmental
Protection Agency, Region II
The Office of Solid
Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER) collect and evaluate large quantities of
environmental data in its RCRA and Superfund Programs. This includes chemical data from sampling,
location data, geological information, and a variety of other types of data.
Traditionally, this information has only been received via voluminous paper
reports. Recent efforts have resulted in
the development of electronic formats for data submittal, and systems for
streamlining and storing the data. Pilot
projects for data capture are under way across the country and efforts to
expand buy in and interest in the formats is ongoing. This session will present the basics of our
Data Element Dictionary (DED) and the Electronic Data Deliverable format (EDD),
which is being adopted, as well as some discussion of the system and tools
which are being put in place.
Wassili Kazakos
FZI
Forschungszentrum Informatik.
Department Manager Database Systems
http://www.fzi.de/dbs/dbs.html, http://www.fzi.de/dbxml,
http://www.fzi.de/kazakos.html, http://www.coastbase.org
Metadata standards have been discussed for years in the environmental domain. Although the community has agreed that metadata are important for information finding, a globally accepted standard is still far away. Different requirements in different environmental application domains, countries and organisations have led to a huge variety on metadata vocabularies and technologies. Even projects which are reusing existing standards tend to adjust these standards slightly to their own requirements. One consequence is that in many projects new metadata repositories are developed or adapted to the new metadata element sets. During the Presentation we will introduce a novel approach for the automation of metadata repository development, applicable for rapid prototyping as well as for functional systems. As input the system requires only a XML Schema describing the metadata vocabulary. Out of this schema the user interface, database schema and the search, retrieval and upload mechanisms are generated through a batch process. The user interface layout can be further controlled by templates. The systems is tested with the full set of ISO 19115 as well as for smaller element sets (like Dublin Core, GELOS, CoastBase Element Set) and is used in the European Community's IST project CoastBase - the virtual coastal and marine data warehouse- as well as in German NOKIS project - a metadata repository for North See and Baltic See Coastal Information. It is currently evaluated for the use in the European Community project EUROSION - a European project for sustainable coastal erosion management.
End of Track