Category Archives: inspire

The ultimate survival kit for your spatial data

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“Ubi amici, ibi opes: Where you find friends, there you’ll find riches.”
Plautus, 200 BC

“Where you find metadata, there you’ll find data.â€�
Antonius Mathus, AD 2014

Research is fundamental to all disciplines in academia and data output is often the result of this endeavour. Most universities view research data as a valuable asset that requires a management strategy to promote and support long-term data curation, preservation, access and re-use.

Universities need the resources to tie together the policies, infrastructure, tools, processes and training to support research data management. The Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) has played a key role in providing these resources to many universities through a range of programmes including the following:

  • Repositories and Preservation Programme, which provided an investment of £14 million in Higher Education repository and digital content infrastructure.
  • Information Environment supporting digital repositories and preservation, including cross-searching facilities across repositories; funding for institutions to develop a critical mass of content, preservation solutions and advice for the development of repositories.
  • Jisc Managing Research Data (JiscMRD) programme, which supported UK academic institutions in their efforts to develop internal research data management policies to ensure data re-use.

The GoGeo service is another example of the Jisc commitment to UK academia to provide resources to securely manage and share research data that have a geographical (spatial) component. The free service offers the following resources for managing research data:

  • Geodoc metadata editor tool, which allows users to create, edit, store, import, export and publish standards-compliant (ISO 19115, UK GEMINI, INSPIRE, Dublin Core, DDI) metadata records;
  • GoGeo portal, which offers users the option of publishing their geospatial metadata records to public or private catalogues, the latter for those who want to control and restrict access to information about their spatial data;
  • ShareGeo, a repository for users to upload and download spatial data; and
  • geospatial metadata workshops, which use presentations and hands-on practicals to introduce attendees to geospatial standards, metadata, geoportals and the GoGeo service.

The ultimate survival kit for your spatial data is a guide that provides a concise overview of these GoGeo service resources which can serve as a complement to your current research data management practices if your datasets have a spatial component. This guide also shows how the GoGeo service resources can be used to manage your spatial data information (metadata) and share it with your project colleagues, or with researchers and students in your department or academic institution.

You’ll discover that

  • it’s much easier and more efficient to use Geodoc to create and export a metadata record to bundle with its spatial dataset than it is to send the dataset without any information to a colleague who might return with questions. Your colleague can also import your metadata record to Geodoc to update if edits are made to your shared dataset.
  • it’s much easier and more efficient to use Geodoc to create and publish metadata records to a private research metadata catalogue on the GoGeo portal than it is to send bundles of metadata records or spatial data information to fellow researchers.

The ultimate survival kit for your spatial data document offers more in detail about the possibilities, the potential that the GoGeo service has to offer for spatial data management and sharing, whether at the personal level, amongst trusted colleagues or visible to the world if you have no further need of your spatial data and wish to share it with others who could benefit from your research endeavours. There could be others who have data that could benefit your research as well?

Please contact me to request a copy of this guide. The guide will include a questionnaire, and if you answer the 10 questions, you will receive a GoGeo-Geodoc coffee mug filled with chocolates. There is nothing to write other than your name and address; each question can be answered with the tick of a box.

geodoc_mug

Thank you very much.

Tony Mathys
Geospatial Metadata Co-ordinator
EDINA
The University of Edinburgh
160 Causewayside
Edinburgh EH9 1PR

My Desk tel: (0)131 651 1443
EDINA Help Desk tel: (0)131 650 3302

email: tony.mathys@ed.ac.uk

An electronic version of the The ultimate survival kit for your spatial data guide can be found on the GoGeo portal’s Geodoc login page at http://www.gogeo.ac.uk/gogeo/metadata/geodoc.htm

 

 

COBWEB Meets the Commissioner at GEO-X

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Nicola Osborne, from the COBWEB project team, explaining all five Citizens Observatories projects to the European Commissioner for the Environment, Janez Poto�nik.

Last week members of the COBWEB Project team attended the GEO-X Plenary and Geneva Ministerial Summit event in Geneva, Switzerland. GEO, the Group on Earth Observation, who have held annual plenary meetings since the organisation was established in 2005. GEO-X marked a particularly significant milestone with participants looking forward to the next 10 years of activity across GEO and GEOSS(the Global Earth Observation System of Systems) .  COBWEB was therefore delighted to be invited to be part of the European Commission delegation at the GEO-X exhibition, and to be able to take up opportunities to give a Speakers Corner talk on the project, to speak at the Citizens’ Observatories side event, to speak at the AIP-6 Side Event, and to show posters at the OGC stand including both a poster and video which was shown in the European Commission Speakers Corner area.

Chris Higgins talks about COBWEB during the Citizens Observatories side event.

Chris Higgins talks about COBWEB during the Citizens Observatories side event.

The project was well represented by members of the COBWEB team covering technical, organisational, stakeholder engagement and dissemination activities, which enabled very productive discussions and networking to take place throughout the week. COBWEB’s Architecture Implementation Pilot (AIP) -6 achievements in enabling single sign on access across the COBWEB access management federation triggered some great conversations for Andreas Matheus, Bart De Lathouwer and project coordinator Chris Higgins. This contribution to the wider GEO community was also acknowledged in a GEOSS showcase film shown as part of the Ministerial Summit.

COBWEB’s development and infrastructure was highlighted in Chris Higgins’ talk during the Citizens Observatories side event, with a particular call made to our fellow Observatories’ to discuss and collaborate around interoperability across the projects. Meanwhile our stakeholder engagement work to date, including collaborations with organisations such as Dyfi Woodlands, was the focus of our Speakers Corner talk by Jamie Williams.

Jamie Williams gives his Speakers Corner talk at GEO-X

Jamie Williams gives his Speakers Corner talk at GEO-X

Citizens Observatories emerged as a key consideration for future environmental policy making and the GEOSS representatives were keen to ensure interoperability and access to citizen science efforts in generating environmental data in the interests of local, regional and global efforts to ameliorate environmental impact. Citizens are key to the European Commission vision as articulated in HORIZON2020 and therefore the initial tranche of Citizen Observatory projects, of which COBWEB is one of five, are trailblazing the future shape of citizen involvement as stakeholder in environmental policy.

The COBWEB project was present at the European Commission exhibition area through a shared stand with all of the Citizens’ Observatories projects: COBWEB,Citi-Sense, WeSenseIt, Omniscientis, and Citclops. Three collaborative posters were created especially for this space, outlining all of the projects in more detail and highlighting areas of commonality across the projects. We were excited to meet GEO Plenary participants and fellow exhibitors throughout the week – with over 89 GEO member nations present this was a truly diverse group. However, the highlight of the exhibition was the visit to the stand on Friday 17th January byJanez Poto�nik, the European Commissioner for the Environment.  The image at the top of this article (taken by Stuart Wrigley from the WeSenseIt project) shows Nicola Osborne, from the COBWEB project team, explaining all five Citizens Observatories projects to the Commissioner.

For the team, the event also presented a wealth of opportunities to meet, learn from and exchange ideas with projects and organisations from across the world, and particularly to make connections to complementary activities funded by the European Union. It was a hugely useful week and we look forward to sharing more from the event, including our presentations, posters, and a brief video on the AIP-6 work showcased, over the following weeks.

Find out more:

To find out about what COBWEB is and how EDINA is involved, please check out the COBWEB site.

Original blog article - COBWEB Meets the Commissioner at GEO-X

IGIBS Followon and use of Underspend

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Its a bit early to be making predictions about how IGIBS might evolve, but a recent presentation to the EDINA geoteam followed by some discussion indicated some of the possibilities.

  • The WMS Factory Tool.  With the simple but effective styling capability that Michael Koutroumpas engineered, I think we have a prototype thats not too far off a production strength tool.  There are loads of scenarios where its valuable to have access to a tool that makes it easy to see your “non-interoperable” data alongside the growing number of INSPIRE View Services (read WMS) from public authorities across Europe going online.  So top of my list is improving this tools styling capability.
  • Associated with this would be better understanding of necessary data publication infrastructure, eg, making it easy to use the other OGC Web Services.  Something like the GEOSS Service Factory ideas emerging from the EuroGEOSS project.  I think there is a real demand for tools to make it easy to use the OGC standards.
  • In the immediate future, I think its likely that the IGIBS team will do some promotion of the project outputs, eg:
    • presenting the project at relevant events, eg, Association GI Laboratories Europe conference, OGC Technical Committee meetings.  This might cost as little as £500 depending on where the event is.
    • use of social media to promote both the WMS Factory Tool and the report on “Best Practice Interaction with the UK Academic Spatial Data Infrastructure”.  This too could cost as little as an additional £500.
  • The latter report is worthy of a lot more investment.  A major output from this project, possibly the single most important output, is the increase in use of UK academic SDI services within the Institute of Geography and Earth Science (IGES) at Aberystwyth University.  IGES is acting as an exemplar for best practice research data management around geospatial data, the department is actively building on the IGIBS work and it will be interesting to see how it develops and if other departments in other institutions see the benefit and start to emulate what Aberystwyth is doing.  More work promoting Steve Walsh’s report would help.

Collaborative by Nature: Interoperable Geospatial Approaches to the Environment

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Now available, the registration page for the GECO/IGIBS event on Friday 11th Nov, 2011 from 1115 to 1500 GMT at the Welsh Government Buildings, Cathays Park, Cardiff.

Full details can be found here

We have a good mix of speakers from the academic, public and private sectors, and should get some good discussion.  I think it will be especially interesting to get some insight into the developing plans for how the devolved government of Wales is rolling out INSPIRE.

From the IGIBS perspective, this is us effectively delivering the first demonstration of UK access management technology being used to secure public sector services in combination with academic sector services as per the project plan

INSPIRE and Universities: An update thanks to James Reid

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After some fantastic help from James Reid at EDINA we thought to put together a blog post summarising some of the conclusions we have come to over INSPIRE.

At this stage it may be  worth having a look at my earlier but less informed post regarding INSPIRE to understand how my understanding of the issues has progressed.

For INSPIRE to be something that universities need to spend time and money complying with, then there are several questions needing an answer. We are not in a position to answer all of them with 100% certainty but with the help of James here are some conclusions we have come to.

1. Are universities  “public bodies” or more accurately public authorities? This appears to be one area that the fog has lifted from. The INSPIRE Regulations will only apply to public authorities and James has taken the trouble to check out this area with Edinburgh  and is certain that universities are public authorities for the purposes of INSPIRE.  So one “Yes” to INSPIRE

2. Do universities hold and control datasets that match the data described in any of the INSPIRE data Annexes? After looking through the datasets collected for the IBIBS project I have found 11 (or about 5% of them) that match up with some of the data themes in Annex iii. The IGIBS data is probably not  representative  of the total extent of data held by Aberystwyth University and a data inventory of data held by some of  the academic staff would be needed to quantify the amount of INSPIRE data held.  So another “Yes” to INSPIRE

3. What is the public task of a university?  Here is where the situation becomes less clear.  There appears to be no public task defined for universities. The problem seems to stem from the fact the universities are not covered by the PSI Regulations and therefore have not needed to define a public task for themselves.  Again James has made some progress on this and pointed to a publication from the National Archives that helps explain the process 0f defining a body’s public task.  There has also been some slightly ambiguous advice from the Scottish Information Commissioner that includes a suggestion that it may be relevant for a university to seek legal advice over the  issue. So there seems to be no clear answer to this question. A case of  “we dont know yet”

4. Do those data identified in 2 above relate to the public task of the university? Again until we know the answer to 3 above  we can only guess at the answer to this question. Commonsense suggests that research and teaching must be part of the task if it is ever defined. So my guess would be a “probable Yes”

5. Will there be any attempt to enforce the regulations? Again no way of knowing the answer to this and it may even involve some judicial intervention to clarify the situation. Strictly speaking if Universities are public authorities for the purposes of the INSPIRE Regulations then they are already not complying with INSPIRE as they have not established a complaints procedure to deal with questions over INSPIRE data provision as required by the Regulations. So currently a “NO” but with the uncertainty surrounding public task it could be a complicated or impossible job to enforce this regulation at present. So this will have to be a wait and see area.

Meeting with EDINA and DCC staff in Edinburgh

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I was fortunate enough to have a meeting with some people from EDINA and the DCC in Edinburgh on Wednesday. The aim of the meeting was to get some input and advice from some experts on the ideas I have for a spatial data management best practice report.  So a big  thank you to Martin Donnelly of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), James Reid, Stuart McDonald, Chris Higgins and Michael Koutroumpas from EDINA.

I had a long 7 hour train journey from Aberystwyth so my apologies for the overdose of PowerPoint slides that I had time to create before the meeting. It was extremely helpful to talk to experienced and knowledgeable  people about the direction the report, which is one of our outputs from the IGIBS project. My background in environmental science leaves a few significant gaps in my knowledge and, as Chris put it, “a sanity check” on my work was well worth the time needed to attend the meeting. I even had the opportunity for an evening walk on Arthur’s Seat and a lunch hour looking around Edinburgh as a bonus.

Some of the key advice from the meeting centered around the following; INSPIRE and how it will or wont impact on Universities,  insights into the not so obvious but very significant benefits of writing a data management plan and where it fits into good data management, some great pointers to other studies and sources of information that will feed into the report, the need to make the report easily accessible to its audience and some great institutional  case study examples from Australian through Californian to British Universities.

Another theme that emerged from the discussion was how INSPIRE and the need for good data management can be viewed as a threat but it is also a great opportunity for academic staff to gain easier access to the ever increasing amounts of spatial data being created around the Globe. A viewpoint that will help to make the report more appealing to time starved researchers.

We also had talk of semantics and just what do you call a spatial data infrastructure (if you don’t want to use SDI). It was suggested that UK Location has moved towards Location Information Infrastructure as a way of making an SDI label more intelligible to the uninitiated. I found this much more enlightening and useful that the recent update from UK Location on “Data Things” and abstracted “Data Objects”  but a few hours of digestion may make this a little more understandable to my irretrievably ecologically orientated mind.  It reminded me of some reading I had done about old Norse governance and how their aassembly was called the “Thing” and met in the “Thingstead”.  I remember thinking that they didn’t have a proper word for it so just called it the “Thing” but I guess that just shows how language develops over time and maybe we can look back to SDI in a few years with the benefit of a really useful label for it, whatever that may be.

As a result of the meeting I am re writing some sections I had drafted and adding some new summary sheets for subsections of the intended audience and more importantly I don’t feel like my original thinking was miles off the mark, just a bit  under-informed and lacking some focus.  So creating the rest of the report will also be made a little easier once I have digested the new material I have been pointed towards.

So thank you once more gentlemen and I look forward to meeting you again if the occasion arises.

Steve