Sunday, January 2, 2011

Libertie, fraternitie, interoperability!


"Libertie, fraternitie, interoperability!" EU INSPIRE program officer Marcel Watelet summed up the results of the OneGeology-Europe project at the final workshop in Paris at the end of October.

1G-E was the most ambitious and the most successful of all the INSPIRE initiatives. Twenty national geological surveys implemented 40 web services in 17 languages. Partners in the continent-wide project continue to harmonize national geologic maps across borders.

But inexplicably, with all this success, the powers that be, dropped geology from consideration from the next round of EU funding. The OneGeology-Europe team is working to keep alive their tremendous successes for a couple of years until the potential to build further may materialize.

For the rest of us working on interoperability in the geosciences, 1G-E has proved that it can be done, and to do it in 17 languages is way beyond the challenge most of us face. So, congratulations to Ian Jackson at the British Geological Survey and the whole 1G-E team.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Call for papers: International Workshop on Climate Change Data Challenges (C2DC 2011)

International Workshop on Climate Change Data Challenges (C2DC 2011)

held in conjunction with the

International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS) 2011: "The Ascent of Computational Excellence in the Land of the Rising Sun",
Computational Science University of Tsukuba, Japan, June 1 - June 3, 2011 (http://www.iccs-meeting.org/).

Workshop website: http://adm05.cmcc.it:8080/C2DC/Home.html

Call for Papers
Climate change scientists are expected to generate hundreds of exabytes of data distributed across heterogeneous storage resources for access, integration, analysis, pre and post-processing, visualization and mining. Significant improvements in the data management field therefore will be critical to increase research productivity in solving complex scientific problems. In this context, several challenges and issues need to be further investigated and addressed. The C2DC workshop includes challenging topics like data preservation, data curation, long term access, metadata schemas, mark-up languages, multi-dimensional data modeling, data discovery, metadata management, harvesting, semantic interoperability, ontologies, data access, integration, provenance, storage, analysis, mining, exa-bytes systems, etc.
The workshop will provide a contribution to the Computational Science field:
- bringing together researchers and practitioners to (i) identify and explore open issues and challenges as well as to (ii) discuss and propose novel data management solutions in the climate change field.
- providing a forum for free exchange of ideas and will be featured by invited talks and refereed paper presentations.
- addressing challenging data management issues and topics, including Exa-bytes systems.
- reporting about novel, interesting and emerging scientific data-oriented initiatives in the climate change domain.
Authors are invited to submit regular papers.

Topics of Interest
- data preservation, data curation, long term access
- metadata schemas, mark-up languages
- multi-dimensional data modeling
- data discovery, metadata management, harvesting
- semantic interoperability, ontologies
- data access, integration, provenance, storage, analysis, mining
- exa-bytes systems, challenges and issues
- high performance data management
- digital libraries
- high performance data mining
- data security and privacy
- scientific data gateways
- distributed metadata management
- dataflow management
- high performance storage management
- replication, indexing, caching and load balancing in distributed environments,
- data grid/clouds & data virtualization for climate change,
- real cases, testbeds and international projects facing climate change data challenges

Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: January 8, 2011
Author notification: February 20, 2011
Camera ready papers: March 7, 2011
Early registration opens: February 15, 2011
Early registration closes: March 31, 2011
Conference sessions: Wednesday June 1 - Friday June 3, 2011

For more information please visit:
- the conference website: http://www.iccs-meeting.org/
- the workshop website: http://adm05.cmcc.it:8080/C2DC/Home.html

Workshop Organizers
- Giovanni Aloisio - Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) & University of Salento - Italy
- Sandro Fiore - Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change (CMCC) & University of Salento - Italy
- Peter Fox - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) - USA
- Andrew Woolf - STFC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK

Submission procedure
Papers reporting original and unpublished research results and experience are solicited. Papers will be selected based on their originality, timeliness, significance, relevance, and clarity of presentation. Papers accepted for this Workshop will be published in the ICCS 2011 Proceedings. After the Conference some papers presented at the ICCS 2011 Workshops will be considered for publication in appropriate journals as Special Issues with the Workshop organizer as the Guest Editor of the journal. Papers for workshops should be submitted directly to the Workshop using the ICCS 2011 paper submission system. Submissions imply the willingness of at least one author to register, attend the conference, and present the paper. Workshop participants must pay the ICCS 2011 conference registration fee. Each paper will be refereed by at least two/three independent reviewers. Paper submission indicates the intention of the author to present the paper at the C2DC workshop at ICCS 2011. The submitted paper must be camera-ready and formatted according to the rules of Procedia Computer Science. Please use this file for a Latex template plus instructions and click here for an MS word template file). Submission implies the willingness of at least one of the authors to register and present the paper. PostScript and source versions of your paper must be submitted electronically through the paper submission system. Please, note that papers must not exceed ten pages in length, when typeset using the Procedia format. Dates of deadlines for draft paper submission (full paper), notification of acceptance, deadline for camera-ready paper submission and registration may be found in the Important Dates section of this Web site. Papers must be based on unpublished, mature and original work and must be submitted to ICCS only.

Call for Papers Use of Collaborative Platforms in Earth Science

Earth Science Informatics, Springer-Verlag Publication
Special Issue – Call for Papers
Use of Collaborative Platforms in Earth Science

Web 2.0 technologies are being actively leveraged by the Earth science informatics community to build online collaborative platforms. The goal of these onlineplatforms is not only to provide web-based accessibility to resources such as data, services and computation but also to foster and build active virtual communities for specific domains.

These technologies enable a wide spectrum of collaboration. At the simplest level, a collaborative platform could be a wiki for posting and sharing scientific information. On the other end of the spectrum, collaborative frameworks have been developed that allow sharing of workflows, analysis results, simultaneous editing of maps, charts etc.

The goal for this special issue is to share efforts by different projects to provide social web features within Earth science tools.

The special issue welcomes journal articles focusing on applications and frameworks to address scientific collaborative goals for a domain. The articles should address the collaborative objectives and describe the underlying technology utilized in building these collaborative platforms. The articles should also provide an objective self-assessment in their ability to engage their targeted community and describe lessons learned in the process.

Guest Editors
Dr. Rahul Ramachandran
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Phone: 865-574-7647
ramachandran@ornl.gov

Dr. Christopher Lynnes
NASA/GSFC, Code 610.2
phone: 301-614-5185
christopher.s.lynnes@nasa.gov

Submission Deadline:
January 31, 2011

Submission Instructions:
· Submit articles online:
o https://www.editorialmanager.com/esin/
· Use Special Issue Short Name: Collaborative Platforms

Information about the Earth Science Informatics Journal can be found here:
http://www.springer.com/12145

Thanks to Christopher Lynnes at NASA/GSFC, for passing this along.