Work package number: WP10
Work package title: Integration of data management practices and coordination with ongoing research infrastructures
WP Leader: BRGM
Objectives
This work package concerns improving access to the wider community, outside the project consortium, of the data products and results of the project. This improved access concerns both dissemination of project results and conclusions to the general public and concerned stakeholders and also facilitating data access for the technical community (e.g. other researchers working on the Marmara Sea region). The work package is divided into three roughly equal tasks. They will focus on the development of data standards concerning the exploitation of data. These data standards will be consistent with existing international standards such as those recommended by the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) concerning web services and metadata, for example. Among other OGC standards, OpenSearch with geospatial and time extensions will be considered. This will help the interoperability of the data and results and it will also be in line with the GEOSS philosophy. Specifically Task 1 will liaise with on-going projects and seek to reach agreements concerning standards so that data products from MARsite and other projects can be integrated together. Activities in GEO-GEOSS and environmental ESFRI projects will be monitored and considered as well. Task 2 will propose a set of standards for the project and a pilot implementation of these standards will be undertaken to demonstrate their benefit. Task 3 specifically concerns facilitating access to information in ESA satellite data. To this end, processing services will be developed for generating value-added products, which could be particularly valuable for this project.
Description of work
Task 1. Integration, data portal and links to other initiatives
This task will be responsible for liaising between MARsite and on-going projects (such as other Supersites initiatives), especially projects related to the Marmara area (e.g., the FP7 project REAKT). The countries of the institutes participating to MARsite are fostering their efforts on seismic measurements inland and at sea through two European large-scale environmental infrastructures of the ESFRI roadmap (http://cordis.europa.eu/esfri/roadmap.htm), EPOS (European Plate Observing System, http://www.epos-eu.org/) and EMSO (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor Observatory, http://www.emso-eu.org/), presently both coordinated by INGV, responsible of this task in MARsite. The constitution of an EMSO ERIC during the next year , is expected to involve all the countries of MARsite consortium and consequently to ensure a long lasting cooperation on MARsite data. This task will integrate the data collection, archiving and dissemination of MARSITE according to the state of the art data management rules of EMSO and EPOS. The Marmara Sea is one of the nodes of EMSO in which a permanent installation at sea is being integrated with land-based networks. This topic is a perfect area for building actual synergies between the two infrastructures and the results of MARsite can assist in this. The main goal of this task is to reach agreements concerning standards so that data products from MARsite and other initiatives can be integrated together.
In addition, coordination with the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the INSPIRE Directive and Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) will be sought. This coordination may involve contributions by members of the consortium to meetings concerning these initiatives in order to develop common approaches and to share best practices. Consideration of environmental policy-relevant findings will be made and a clear summary of the implications of these results on relevant policy will be produced at the end of the project.
This task will also develop a portal, where data and results from the project could be downloaded. This portal will be based on an existing activities being undertaken at KOERI. Progress made in Task 2 on data standards and by TUBITAK on data dissemination infrastructure in other projects will help guide the development of this portal. It is planned that this portal will be based at KOERI with a back-up made by TUBITAK.
The open access data policy requested for European projects on environment data is modulated in the special case of Civil Security issues such as Marmara supersite by the priority of early warning and real time response as presented in WP9. In case of crisis, data access has to be delayed for actors outside the decision making process. It will remain anyway accessible for the sake of reanalysis.
Task 2. Development of standards for metadata, data models and services following international norms (e.g. ISO and OGC)
MARsite involves many dozens of different data types and sources, from real-time point-based measurements to hazard maps. For example, WP2 will provide long-term land-based data, WP3 provides data from long-term continuous geodetic monitoring of crustal deformation, borehole data will come from WP4, real-time data from seismological networks will be available via WP5 and data from sea-based instruments will come from WP8. However, all of these data are currently available in different formats. Consequently it is difficult to analyse these different information sources together, which is a significant impediment on scientific investigations in the Marmara Sea. Therefore, this task aims to develop standards for metadata, data models and services for information sources currently provided by the project partners that are consistent with international forms. Furthermore, the target is to compile all available data in a single server for the entire Marmara region in well established formats currently used by seismologist, geodesists and marine geophysicists.The project will define rules to build an open architecture able to include new data providers, sensor information and services. These rules should be based on the recommendations defined in the Architecture and Data Committee of GEOSS. The use of standards and interoperability arrangements are key elements in the design of the architecture of the project. The existing standards will be used to discover data and services, to improve the access to the data and sensors information, and to provide results. The agreement among the partners to use standards specified by ISO and OGC (like Observations and Measurements, or the group of Sensor Web Enablement – SWE- specifications) will improve the connection to existing monitoring networks. These standards will be clearly defined within a report, which will also consist of analysis conducted in Task 1 on the links to other initiatives. Once this report has been finalized, a representative set of data types and sources will be selected for which these standards will be implemented as part of a pilot implementation consisting of a web portal and tools to access and display the various datasets. In addition, access to the value-added services developed within Task 4 of this WP will also be implemented within this pilot. This pilot will then be accessible to the wider community via the GEO broker, which provides a unique access point to federate services.
Task 3. Fostering access to and integration of Earth Observation data products tailored to the needs of the geo-hazard community
This task aims to generate innovative Earth Observation (EO)-based products tailored to the needs of the geo-hazard community and to make them available together with other sources of data (e.g. in-situ and model output) in a seamless manner through the GENESI collaborative data platform, which already serves a wide Earth Science community, including some Environmental ESFRI infrastructure projects. This will require pre-processing the data sets provided by the consortium, taking account of their specific features (e.g. model / satellite / in-situ, format, meta-data), to make them accessible to the whole community. It is also foreseen to foster the exploitation of ESA EO data, from the archive of radar data and new generation of Explorers Missions, by using new algorithms (available from the science community) to generate EO products dedicated to the study of geo-hazards. This Task will address a variety of EO products related to geo-hazards, with focus on the generation of EO-based gravity changes products. Particular attention will be on the exploitation of the new generation of GOCE products. The idea is to provide scientists with an easily integrated tool to make sense of heterogeneous data and advance our understanding of natural hazards, enabling them to do science without investing efforts in technical data processing.
