Mission report: Single Information Space
From Intamap
Mission report: Toward a single European information space for Environment, Frascati, 4/4/07, Dan Cornford
This is a quick project relevant feedback for INTAMAP from my attendance at the above workshop.
The workshop focussed on interoperability and looked to help define the road-map for the next ICT call in the area of helping to establish a single information space in Europe. Indeed at times the workshop felt like a session setting out stalls for the bids into the next ICT call. Note that it seems only one big IP will be funded from the call that will come out in May.
I had 10 minutes to give the essence of INTAMAP. I focussed on the interoperability issues and mainly some of our problems in creating a genuinely interoperable system, especially the competing standards for observations (SensorML, GML observations, Observations and Measurements) and how to include and report uncertainty. I might have put quite a bit of emphasis on uncertainty and the requirement to chracterise this when chaining services - this went down very well; a number of people are interested and the EU took the points very well. So I think it was a success on that level - people are interested and several want to work with us. I will put more detail later, when I get some time ....
A variety of projects were present: ORCHESTRA seems to dominate both intellectually, but also numerically. They are a decent outfit and Matt will be looking in more detail at how we can fit with their reference model (this is now submitted to OGC for consideration). I also talked with them about their view of how to include uncertainty and its relation to their meta-data models - Matt is looking at this also. They are a very open group and very friendly - they also have strong links (many shared partners) to SANY.
The WIN also presented - this is the other big IP in the area; WIN and ORCHESTRA showed that they could interoperate in a limited manner (we should avoid live demos - they always fail!!).
ESA also has some interesting projects which are essentially portals and also some nice GRID based services to allow direct interaction with their data, but this is for now to relevant to us, although at some point we might like to propose that INTAMAPs system is made available via their GRID based facilities to enable it to be used with their data?
Other relevant projects that presented are:
HMA - this is ESA's portal for access to its data. There is some work on data quality here, and the guy that presented this, Franck Sery, was very supportive of my comments on uncertainty. As an aside, not from the meeting, there is some discussion on the range of EU projects in the article in GeoInformatics. There is an interesting discussion of HMA on Brian Lawrence's blog.
The HALO project is really focussed very strongly on data assimilation and was not really very relevant to us. The data assimilation people, here in the guise of ECMWF have not fully engaged with the ideas of interoperability and are very much driven by their own internal need for computing power to solve their huge models.
[http:?? RISE] is a little more focussed on data harmonisation and process but they are interested in what we are doing, and might have some sueful input.
Not finished. Will work on this....
