Digicene

Libertie, fraternitie, interoperability!

2011-01-02T17:52:00.001-08:00

"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.

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

2011-01-01T09:47:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-01T09:43:00.000-08:00

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.

NSF data sharing guidelines for the Earth Sciences

2010-10-06T18:55:00.000-07:00

The Earth Sciences Division (EAR) of NSF has released guidelines for data sharing. The full statement follows:

This statement provides guidelines from the Division of Earth Sciences (EAR), National Science Foundation, for the implementation of the Foundation's Data Sharing Policy. The overall purpose and fundamental objective of these policy statements is to ensure and facilitate full and open access to quality data for research and education in the Earth Sciences. These guidelines are considered to be a binding condition on all EAR-supported projects.

The Division of Earth Sciences conforms to the following statement on sharing of research results and data (NSF Award and Administration Guide, January 2010, VI.D.4):

Dissemination and Sharing of Research Results

a. Investigators are expected to promptly prepare and submit for publication, with authorship that accurately reflects the contributions of those involved, all significant findings from work conducted under NSF grants. Grantees are expected to permit and encourage such publication by those actually performing that work, unless a grantee intends to publish or disseminate such findings itself.

b. Investigators are expected to share with other researchers, at no more than incremental cost and within a reasonable time, the primary data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials created or gathered in the course of work under NSF grants. Grantees are expected to encourage and facilitate such sharing. Privileged or confidential information should be released only in a form that protects the privacy of individuals and subjects involved. General adjustments and, where essential, exceptions to this sharing expectation may be specified by the funding NSF Program or Division/Office for a particular field or discipline to safeguard the rights of individuals and subjects, the validity of results, or the integrity of collections or to ac accommodate the legitimate interest of investigators. A grantee or investigator also may request a particular adjustment or exception from the cognizant NSF Program Officer.

c. Investigators and grantees are encouraged to share software and inventions created under the grant or otherwise make them or their products widely available and usable.

d. NSF normally allows grantees to retain principal legal rights to intellectual property developed under NSF grants to provide incentives for development and dissemination of inventions, software and publications that can enhance their usefulness, accessibility and upkeep. Such incentives do not, however, reduce the responsibility that investigators and organizations have as members of the scientific and engineering community, to make results, data and collections available to other researchers.

e. NSF program management will implement these policies for dissemination and sharing of research results, in ways appropriate to field and circumstances, through the proposal review process; through award negotiations and conditions; and through appropriate support and incentives for data cleanup, documentation, dissemination, storage and the like.

The Division of Earth Sciences is committed to the establishment, maintenance, validation, description, and distribution of high-quality, long-term data sets.

Therefore:

1. Preservation of all data, samples, physical collections and other supporting materials needed for longterm earth science research and education is required of all EAR-supported researchers.

2. Data archives must include easily accessible information about the data holdings, including quality assessments, supporting ancillary information, and guidance and aids for locating and obtaining data.

3. It is the responsibility of researchers and organizations to make results, data, derived data products, and collections available to the research community in a timely manner and at a reasonable cost. In the interest of full and open access, data should be provided at the lowest possible cost to researchers and educators. This cost should, as a first principle, be no more than the marginal cost of filling a specific user request.

4. Data may be made available for secondary use through submission to a national data center, publication in a widely available scientific journal, book or website, through the institutional archives that are standard for a particular discipline (e.g. IRIS for seismological data, UNAVCO for GPS data), or through other EAR-specified repositories.

5. For those programs in which selected principle investigators have initial periods of exclusive data use, data should be made openly available as soon as possible, but no later than two (2) years after the data were collected. This period may be extended under exceptional circumstances, but only by agreement between the Principal Investigator and the National Science Foundation. For continuing observations or for long-term (multi-year) projects, data are to be made public annually.

6. Data inventories should be published or entered into a public database periodically and when there is a significant change in type, location or frequency of such observations.

7. Principal Investigators working in coordinated programs may establish (in consultation with other funding agencies and NSF) more stringent data submission procedures.

8. Within the proposal review process, compliance with these data guidelines will be considered in the Program Officer's overall evaluation of a Principal Investigator's record of prior support. Exceptions to these data guidelines require agreement between the Principal Investigator and the NSF Program Officer.

7th Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists

2010-06-11T14:05:00.001-07:00

This announcement in from Chaitan Baru at SDSC:

We are pleased to announce the 7th Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists (CSIG) to be held August 9-13 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the University of California, San Diego campus. [right, attendees at the 2009 CSIG]

General and program information, as well as online registration is available at http://www.geongrid.org/csig10.

The broad theme for CSIG‘10 will be emergent Geoinformatics approaches to 3D and 4D integration of geoscience data. Given the diverse interests of past CSIG participants, and based on feedback that they have provided, CSIG’10 will feature two “tracks” of instruction:

1. Build Track: technologies related to building Geoinformatics systems; and
2. Education Track: use of Geoinformatics resources in education

Interested applicants at all levels are encouraged to apply, including graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and professionals in earth science and related disciplines. You will have the option to choose the track of interest at the time of application.

Course registration and accommodations are paid for with support received from the National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov). However, please note that participants will be responsible for funding their own travel to San Diego for the Institute.

The Registration Deadline for CSIG ’10 has been extended to June 14th. The registration form can be found at http://www.geongrid.org/csig10.

Questions should be directed to ‘summerinstitute@geongrid.org.

Research Data and Preservation Summit in Phoenix

2010-04-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

The ASSIS&T's Research Data and Preservation Summit got underway here in Phoenix an hour ago, in conjunction with a week-long Information Architecture meeting. There are 100+ attendees from all over the world in the summit and animated discussion started almost immediately.

My sense after just a few minutes is that developments are coming along so fast in so many areas, that this 2-day event is going to be full of revelations and discovery.

AAPG Geoscience Data Preservation Committee

2010-04-08T21:41:00.000-07:00

The AAPG Geoscience Data Preservation Committee meets on April 13 at the AAPG Annual Meeting in New Orleans. The agenda offers a view of what efforts and issues are in play around the country.

Presentations:

John Steinmetz, Director, Indiana Geological Survey - Update on Federal and State Efforts toward Geoscience Data Preservation, including results from AASG Spring Liaison Meeting, summer 2009 Data Preservation Workshop, and 2010 National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program Grants.

David Orchard, ConocoPhillips, Houston, TX – Finding Cores from the Permian Basin – Efforts to Create a Database of all existing Permian Basin Core Material – where it’s housed, accessing the material, etc.

Rod Tillman, Consulting Geologist, Tulsa, OK - Cole Memorial Cross Section Digitization efforts being done cooperatively by Oklahoma Geological Survey, Tulsa Geological Society, Bureau of Land Management and AAPG.

Jim McGhay – Energy Libraries Online, Tulsa, OK –update on the progress of Energy Libraries Online, the non-profit effort of several leading energy information libraries in the Mid-continent region to preserve and develop their collections into a consolidated digital and accessible database

Michael Laine, Curator, Utah Gore Research Center, Salt Lake City, UT - Utah Core Research Center: Adaptation for Survival

Sarah Ramdeen, Florida Department of Environmental Protection - Research on digital curation for the geosciences – update on PhD program research.

Kenneth Papp – Curator, Geologist, Alaska Geologic Materials Center - Data Preservation Efforts at the Alaska Geologic Materials Center

Bill Harrison - Director, Michigan Basin Core Research Laboratory - Geoscience Data Preservation Efforts in Michigan

Patrick Gooding - Manager, Well Sample and Core Library, Kentucky Geological Survey - Ongoing Geoscience Data Preservation Efforts in Kentucky.

Thanks to committee co-chair Bev DeJarnett at the Texas Bur. of Economic Geology for sharing the agenda.

Exploring the Open Government Datasets

2010-03-07T11:04:00.000-08:00

There is a growing list of datasets being posted on the Data.gov website, at the direction of the White House.

I haven't found many primary geology sets but there are sets for hydrology, hazards, geothermal, etc.

137 years of Popular Science now online for free

2010-03-07T10:54:00.000-08:00

Popular Science is making all of their archives of articles for the last 137 years, available online. The older stuff is the most fun.

NRC study underway on USGS spatial data strategy

2010-01-30T13:31:00.000-08:00

The National Research Council is conducting a study ("Spatial Data Enabling USGS Strategic Science in the 21st Century") for the USGS on their science strategy for spatial data. The committee is still accepting comments at least for the next couple of weeks.

Project Scope:

This study will examine progress made in establishing spatial data infrastructures and the challenges faced by those infrastructures, within the context of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure. The study will examine the role that the USGS can play in continuing to ensure access to high quality geospatial data and support its use in scientific analyses and decision-making through a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) construct.

The committee will undertake three main tasks:

(1) identify existing knowledge and document lessons learned during previous efforts to develop SDIs and their support of scientific endeavors;

(2) develop a vision for optimizing an SDI to organize, integrate, access, and use scientific data; and

(3) create a roadmap to guide the USGS in accomplishing the vision within the scope of the USGS Science Strategy.

Google and NOAA team up to display ocean and climate data

2010-01-26T20:26:00.000-08:00

NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research announced that they and Google "have signed a cooperative research and development agreement outlining how they will work together to create state-of-the-art visualizations of scientific data to illustrate how our planet works."

This strikes me as another indication of the convergence towards a common data capabilities in the spatially-based sciences.

The areas that NOAA and Google will cooperate on include:

Engaging the public in ongoing and historic scientific expeditions including those of the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer;
Compiling and improving bathymetric datasets to display in Google Earth and make available for downloading;
Expanding NOAA efforts to publish oceanographic data, especially data from the NOAA-led Integrated Ocean Observing System;
Expanding NOAA efforts to publish climate data, especially data from the greenhouse gas monitoring system;
Increasing the amount of data available for NOAA’s Science on a Sphere, an educational Earth science display system, [http://sos.noaa.gov/] by adapting it to display files in the Keyhole Markup Language, the file format Google Earth and Google Maps use for geographic data; and
Providing interactive access to marine zoning and regulatory information concerning regions such as continental shelf boundaries and marine protected areas.

OneGeology blog and twitter

2010-01-18T08:14:00.000-08:00

Ian Jackson, coordinator of the OneGeology consortium, is now blogging and tweeting. His blog, OneGeoBlogy, went live last week.

It's immediately obvious how much is happening with OneGeology globally and in Europe.

Geek shortage threatens national security

2010-01-16T18:19:00.000-08:00

The Pentagon's DARPA is worried that we are not producing enough computer geeks to meet national security needs, so they are looking for new ways to attract teens into careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM).

An article on Wired.com quotes DARPA as saying, “ability to compete in the increasingly internationalized stage will be hindered without college graduates with the ability to understand and innovate cutting edge technologies in the decades to come…. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD [Department of Defense] systems that include software development.”

Wired reports that " computer science enrollment dropped 43 percent between 2003 and 2006."

At AZGS, we've had trouble finding people to work in geoinformatics. Computer scientists are looking for cutting-edge research projects rather than implementation and standards development. Geoscientists typically don't get the CS background needed unless they happen to have a personal interest in it and often that seems to be discouraged by academic programs that push more core courses.

Social media for the public good

2010-01-13T19:31:00.000-08:00

The State of Utah's Web portal "includes more than 30 blogs from public entities and more than 200 Twitter feeds from state and local agencies within the state," according to a report in Governing magazine.

Utah issued guidelines this past fall on "recognize the difference between social media as a private individual and social media as a public or government representative."

Too many governments (and a reported 50% of private sector companies) automatically ban use of social media tools like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter by employees on the assumption they will be big time wasters. If the telephone were invented today, I expect it too would be viewed as a tempting distraction to lure employees from their gainful duties and lollygag with calls to family, friends, or bookies.

It's nice to see Utah (and others like my state of Arizona who allow us to blog, tweet, and more) embrace change for the public good.

Peer-Reviewed Data Publication report posted

2010-01-13T19:11:00.000-08:00

I'm passing on the announcement that:

A draft report from the 2009 fall AGU town hall on "Peer-Reviewed Data Publication and Other Strategies to Sustain Verifiable Science" has been posted to the ESIP Stewardship and Preservation wiki at http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Interagency_Data_Stewardship/2009AGUTownHall. The town hall was jointly sponsored by the ESIP federation and the AGU data committee. Please take a look and feel free to edit or comment on the report. We particularly would like comments if you attended the town hall and feel that we missed an important point. It is our intent to submit a boiled down version of the report as an EOS paper.

Thanks,

Ruth Duerr, Mark Parsons, Jean-Bernard Minster, Rob Raskin

DataONE network for bio, enviro data

2009-12-24T15:36:00.000-08:00

A new interoperable distributed network for biological and environmental data is being funded under the NSF DataNet initiative. Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) "will ensure preservation and access to multi-scale, multi-discipline, and multi-national science data. DataONE will transcend domain boundaries and make biological data available from the genome to the ecosystem; make environmental data available from atmospheric, ecological, hydrological, and oceanographic sources; provide secure and long-term preservation and access; and engage scientists, land-managers, policy makers, students, educators, and the public through logical access and intuitive visualizations."

DataONE sounds analogous to what the geoscience community is doing through the Geoscience Information Network (GIN) and the National Geothermal Data System (NGDS), but for bio-based and related data.

This is yet another indication of the convergence I'm seeing among all of the spatially-based domain sciences in digital data - Web-based, interoperable, distributed, and open-sourced.

Invitation to participate in Energy Industry Metadata Standards Initiative

2009-12-24T14:55:00.000-08:00

The Energy Industry Metadata Standards Working Group sent out an invitation to parties potentially interested in an initiative working toward metadata standards for the energy community. I'm posting it here for wider circulation:

1. … provides a brief update about the Energy Industry Metadata Standards Initiative, an effort within the energy community to realize metadata standards and guidelines that will enable efficient discovery and evaluation of, and access to information resources both within and between organizations in the community;

2. … outlines work that will begin in Jan. 2010 to collect from such organizations the requirements for a metadata content standard that will support the goals of the initiative;

3. … and most importantly, seeks Active Participants within the community to provide the Energy Industry Metadata Standards Working Group with these requirements.

1. Initiative Update

During 2009, the Energy Industry Metadata Standards Working Group was created, and formulated a plan to develop metadata standards for efficient discovery and evaluation of, and access to information resources within the energy community. The plan incorporated input solicited from the community during

· two workshops held on March 31 and Sept. 30, with 19 and 26 organizations represented at each, respectively;

· review of a draft position paper published July 8 (published Sept. 9 in final form).

Awareness of these activities and the opportunity to provide input were widely publicized, both via email and presentations at seven technical meetings and conferences, including the AAPG Annual Meeting (Denver), ESRI User Conference (San Diego), ECIM Conference (Norway), and Digital E&P Conference (Houston). The results of these activities have been similarly widely publicized. The position paper and information about the workshops are posted on the Metadata Work Group area of Energistics’ web site.

The key deliverable in the plan is the Energy Industry Profile (EIP) of ISO 19115:2003, which is itself a robust, international metadata content specification. Preliminary requirements for the EIP were compiled during the March 31 and Sept. 30 workshops, and supplemented with information provided by members of the Work Group Steering Team. These preliminary requirements will be refined using input collected in 1Q2010 (see below) to identify the minimum collection of mandatory and recommended metadata attributes, and supporting domain values, considered by the community as necessary to support the goals of the initiative.

2. Next Steps

In Jan. 2010, the Energy Industry Metadata Standards Working Group will distribute via email to Active Participants in the initiative a request for input regarding the Energy Industry Profile. Material accompanying the request will provide Active Participants with instructions and facilitate their ability to contribute input about their organization’s perspective regarding requirements for an industry metadata standard. We anticipate providing multiple mechanisms for providing input; the minimum investment required is expected to be 2-4 hours. The deadline for Active Participants to return their organization’s input will be four weeks after distribution of the request.

Active Participant input will be used to finalize the EIP v1.0 Release Candidate specification, a document that will be published to the community for comment in May 2010. Once finalized as EIP v1.0, the specification is expected to be implemented in several pilot projects, the first of which is the result of on-going, formal collaboration with the Geoscience Information Network Project. The EIP v1.0 will be used as a component of the GIN architecture, which in turn will be implemented to enable the U.S. DOE-funded National Geothermal Data System.

3. Call for Active Participants

In preparation for distributing the Jan. 2010 request for input about the draft EIP, the Work Group invites members of the community receiving this email to identify themselves as interested in contributing as Active Participants. Those already identified as an Active Participants should confirm their interest in continuing to contribute at this level. Only Active Participants will receive the email request, and supporting material mentioned in §2 above, for requirements that will yield the EIP v1.0 Release Candidate.

If you are interested in contributing requirements as an Active Participant during this next phase of the initiative, please respond to this invitation by Jan. 11, 2010. Note: We ask that organizations identify a single Active Participant to coordinate, and reconcile if necessary, input from multiple internal stakeholders, and deliver the result to the Work Group.

We look forward to your participation in this industry development effort. If you have any questions regarding the initiative, feel free to contact any member of the Work Group Steering Team (below, and copied on this email), or send email to metadata@energistics.org.

Scott Hills
Chevron Energy Technology Company

Steve Richards
GIN Project/Arizona Geological Survey

Lisa Derenthal
Gimmal Group

Alan Doniger
Energistics

Robert Graham
BHP Billiton Petroleum

David Danko
ESRI

Back in the saddle

2009-12-13T13:14:00.000-08:00

I started this blog with the best of intentions but.....

This year has turned into a non-stop rush centered around the growing adoption of the Geoscience Information Network, precisely the type of thing I wanted to talk about here.

So, I'm going to try again. Blogging is perfectly suited to following the fast moving developments in technology and community.

Some recent news:

DOE funds National Geothermal Data System - http://www.geothermaldata.org/

AZGS launches GIN user site - http://usgin.org/

GIN developer's site - http://lab.usgin.org/

State Geologists to deploy NGDS nationwide and populate it with state-specific data - http://www.azgs.az.gov/geothermal_pressrelease.shtml

Energistics releases white paper on metadata standards and adopts GIN and NGDS as prototypes for data integration in the upstream petroleum industry - http://www.energistics.org/posc/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=1213&SnID=568245291

Britain's OpenGeoscience

2009-12-13T13:04:00.000-08:00

Our colleagues at the British Geological Survey continue to set the bar higher. The release of OpenGeoscience last week got a months worth of visitors in a single day with over 10 million image hits and 300,000 page views.

The BGS announcement describes it as

The site provides the world’s first open-access supply of street-level geological mapping for a whole country - better than 50m resolution - with on-the-fly viewing of bedrock and superficial geology overlaid on street maps and aerial photography. The web map service (WMS) provides access to 1:50,000 scale geological mapping for mash-up use (allowing access via OneGeology) and has open access to 50,000 photos, databases, educational resources, reports and software.

Awash in data

2009-02-25T11:39:00.000-08:00

The ESRI PUG (Petroleum User Group) meeting is wrapping up this afternoon in Houston, and I am coming away with a few themes that were prominent.

One is that we are awash in data, but there are huge challenges in discovering, accessing, and retrieving that data.

Another topic that was pushed hard by ESRI's development-meister Clint Brown, is that the Web and online services is the future for GIS.

And third, the is strong consensus on what I call interoperability although that term was not specifically heard that much. But the challenges of dealing with vast arrays of data, using online resources and tools stated above, are addressed by the broad concept of interoperability and all the 'stuff' that makes that happen.

PUG group calls for petroleum metadata standards

2009-02-25T11:37:00.001-08:00

There seems to be agreement in the petroleum industry to establish common metadata standards and applications for discovery and retrieval of digital information. The goal is to support both proprietary data and exchange of data between companies.

The Metadata Working Group forum this morning at the ESRI Petroluem User Group (PUG) annual meeting in Houston proposed a metadata foundation based on ISO 19115 for the North American Profile (NAP) with a newly developed Energy Industry Profile. Secondly, the group recommended that the not-for-profit standards consortium, Energistics, serve as custodian to maintain and support the metadata infrastructure.

The presenters/proposers included:

Lisa Derenthal, Gimmal Group

Scott Hills, Chevron

Robert Graham, BHP Billiton Petroleum

Alan Doniger, Energistics

with additional input from Grant Tucker, Shell.

Scott made the point that the metadata is for all information, not just geospatial, to promote the concept that geospatial data are an integral component of the data environment and not something separate. Also, the metadata proposal here is much broader than just the PUG.

Grant showed the ISO Metadata Wizard data entry software/form developed by Shell to facilitate collection of metadata internally.

The audience was fully in support of the metadata proposal outlined today. The organizers met afterwards to lay out a 12-14 month timeline for a position paper, and developing a robust plan to bring to industry. Participants are expected to be energy companies and industry vendors.

Scott sees GeoSciML serving as the data exchange standard to create an end-to-end process for data discovery, access, and exchange.

Fixing geospatial political babel

2009-02-07T20:37:00.001-08:00

The Coalition of Geospatial Organizations (COGO) made what may sounds like an obscure bureaucratic proposal recently, but one that could have profound impact on the nation’s geospatial infrastructure. They recommended that Congress include ‘geospatial’ in the name and mission of an existing subcommittee in both the House and Senate to oversee geospatial data and activities.

Currently, responsibility for oversight and authorization of Federal geospatial activities is spread among 30 House and Senate committees and subcommittees. That means there is no consistent national policy and in fact, with geospatial duties scattered among 40 Federal agencies and critical business lines run by the Office of Management and Budget, the plethora of Congressional bodies may create numerous “national policies.” It reminds me of the famous parable about 30 blindmen describing an elephant by each one feeling one part of the massive animal. Each had a completely different interpretation of what it was.

COGO is a coalition of 15 national professional societies, trade associations, and membership organizations representing over 30,000 professionals in the geospatial field [member logos above].

They note that the U.S. government doesn’t even know how much it spends on geospatial information. The last estimate, in 1993, was over $4 billion. That strikes me as ridiculously small for what must be going on today.

The COGO proposal is a sensible proposal that could have explosive ramifications by facilitating a truly national imperative for dealing with geospatial data.

Digital Mapping Techniques workshop scheduled

2009-01-29T17:35:00.001-08:00

Plans for the 13th annual Workshop on Digital Mapping Techniques (DMT ’09) were released today. The event is co-sponsored by USGS and the Association of American State Geologists (AASG) and focuses on geologic mapping issues. DMT ’09 is hosted by the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey in Morgantown, WV, May 10-13, 2009. More info is at http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Info/dmt for the moment. A dedicated Web site should be up next month.

ScienceDirect feed for computers in geology

2009-01-26T11:56:00.000-08:00

There is an easy way to get feeds from ScienceDirect of new publications in a variety of Earth science fields including on the topic of Computers in Earth Science. Chris at Highly Allochthonous posted a set of direct links or you log in with a personal Sciendirect registration, click on 'Alerts' in the main navigation bar, and choose the 'topic alerts' option. Chris listed feeds for GSA publications and others followed with comments on feeds from AGU and other publishers.

Here is the shortcut for the Computers in Earth Science feed:

http://rss.sciencedirect.com/getMessage?registrationId=IJIGIKIGJPIHQJJHKJINIOJMJOJPIKPKOBKOLRROOW

U.S. IT leadership materially eroded

2009-01-26T11:40:00.001-08:00

A new study released by the National Research Council warns that the U.S. "position of leadership [in IT] is not a birthright, and it is now under pressure."

The pre-release of "Assessing the Impacts of Changes in the Information Technology R&D Ecosystem: Retaining Leadership in an Increasingly Global Environment," concludes that,
"the U.S. position in IT leadership today has materially eroded compared with that of prior decades, and the nation risks ceding IT leadership to other nations within a generation unless the United States recommits itself to providing the resources needed to fuel U.S. IT innovation, to removing important roadblocks that reduce the ecosystem’s effectiveness in generating innovation and the fruits of innovation, and to becoming a lead innovator and user of IT."

Their findings and recommendations fall into four broad areas:

Objective 1. Strengthen the effectiveness and impact of federally funded information technology research.
Objective 2. Remain the strongest generator of and magnet for technical talent.
Objective 3. Reduce friction that harms the effectiveness of the U.S. information technologyR&D ecosystem, while maintaining other important political and economic objectives.
Objective 4. Ensure that the United States has the infrastructure for communications, computing, applications, and services that enables U.S. information technology users and innovators to lead the world.

I need to read this whole study in detail, but on first pass, the conclusions are not a surprise and the goals seem evident. The challenge, as usual, is getting there.

National GIS proposed

2009-01-24T18:08:00.001-08:00

Jack Dangermond, head of ESRI, is circulating a $1.2 billion proposal to build a National GIS, as part of the recovery and reinvestment plans in Congress.

The proposal is gaining support from state GIS/GIO's around the country, despite some early concerns that the proposal hasn't been fully discussed in the community and the implications aren't fully known. But the sense is that the proposal is gaining traction.

There's been a push in the past couple of weeks to try to get the Western Governor's Association to formally endorse it.

There's some brief excerpts from the proposal at the GIS User blog.

Digital Dirt blog will chronicle development of digital map

2009-01-07T13:08:00.001-08:00

Kyle House (Geologic Froth) at the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology launched a new blog the other day to chronicle the development of the Nevada Digital Dirt Mapping Project.

Kyle hopes to "actively engage the relevant members of the geological community in discussing, critiquing, and reviewing the development of the map."

It looks like a fascinating project. The digital maps are expected to have interactive functions such as geotagged photos, GPS points, and located geochronological data.

NSF investment in digital libraries questioned

2009-01-05T18:58:00.000-08:00

An article in this week's issue of Science raises the question of whether NSF's investment of $175 million in the National Digital Science Library has paid off.

Author Jeffrey Mervis ("NSF Rethinks Its Digital Library") says "the payoff from NSF's investment, which has averaged almost $18 million a year [right], has been hard to quantify. Its biggest advocates admit that relatively few educators and researchers have even heard of NSDL, much less visited the Web site or contributed material. It's proven to be no match for Google as a search engine for finding good sites. And there's no evidence to date that NSDL has improved student learning. Although NSF officials insist that NSDL has been a success, the agency is in the process of reducing its support for digital libraries."

In a companion article, Mervis describes the history of DLESE (Digital Library for Earth Science Education). He reports that "in 2005, after getting a scathing report from a visiting committee on how NSF's $21 million investment had been managed, NSF decided to phase out its support. After much soul-searching, a slimmed-down DLESE found a home in 2007 within UCAR's National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, where it is now part of NCAR's library."

These are two examples of the sustainability challenge, whether it's NSF or other funding. What happens when the funds run out after developing a new capability? How do you maintain cyberinfrastructure after it's built? We are all looking for answers.

Welcome to the Digicene era

2009-01-04T08:28:00.001-08:00

In 2000, Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene to recognize that humans have become a significant geologic agent, and thus "it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term 'anthropocene' for the current geological epoch."

An article in GSA Today last February proposed adoption of the Anthropocene as a new geologic epoch, stating that, " since the start of the Industrial Revolution, Earth has endured changes sufficient to leave a global stratigraphic signature distinct from that of the Holocene or of previous Pleistocene interglacial phases, encompassing novel biotic, sedimentary, and geochemical change."

So, with tongue-in-cheek bravado, I propose that somewhere in the last decade, we entered a period where digital and online technology are intersecting with the Earth and space sciences to change the way we work, think, and view the nature of our science. I humbly submit that we define this age as the Digicene, for "digi-" referring to "digital," and "-cene" the Greek root for "new."

The rise of the new age is indicated by the formation of the Geological Society of America's Geoinformatics Division, and the American Geophysical Union's Earth and Space Informatics Focus Group. The latter is the fastest growing area in AGU and hosted 22 sessions at the Fall meeting last month. The National Research Council's Board on Earth Sciences and Resources held a day-long roundtable on geoinformatics as well last month, as a prelude to studying the needs and challenges of the rapidly expanding field.

My intent with this blog is to share news and developments, comments, and opinions about what's happening in the broadly defined area of geoinformatics. I've posted a few items in my other blog, "Arizona Geology" but that forum is aimed at a specific audience and fairly well-defined set of topics. I've felt constrained in talking about geoinformatics there and have thought for some time that a separate blog is warranted.

I join a small group of geoinformatics bloggers including Robert Huber and Jens Klump (Stratigraphy.net Internals), Kyle House (Geologic Froth), Ramon Arrowsmith (Arrowsmith blog), and Andy (Open Source Paleontologist). As the geoblogosphere has mushroomed in the past two years, I expect the cadre of geoinformatics blogs will expand commensurately.