GEOSS: Now with more wow
The GEOWOW project aimed to ensure that GEOSS information on inland waters, ocean ecosystems and the weather is easy to find, access and use. “A lot of data were already available when our project started,” says coordinator Joost van Bemmelen of the European Space Agency. “But users often didn’t know how to access them, or put them to good use. Our objective was to help users locate and exploit the data they need.”
Much of the project’s work to enhance interoperability focused on the Discovery and Access Broker (DAB), the part of the GEOSS Common Infrastructure that provides the interface between the sources contributing data to the system of systems and the communities that use these data. GEOWOW notably enhanced the DAB by boosting its search capabilities and the ranking of results.
In addition, GEOWOW produced modules that enable users to make the most of GEOSS data. These include generic components and tools designed for specific user communities. “Making data accessible is not just a matter of enabling users to download them,” says Van Bemmelen. “It also involves giving users the possibility to use data remotely, and giving them ways to extract the information they need.”
Tapping the world’s torrents…
Earth observation is a complex information environment, where input is produced by technologies as diverse as wind gauges, buoys and satellites, potentially recorded using incompatible data structures and formats, and managed by many different entities. The users of this disparate material are also quite varied, frequently using terminology specific to their community. As one of many contributions to greater interoperability, GEOWOW identified discrepancies and adapted the DAB’s search capabilities to facilitate the dialogue.
A number of case studies enabled the GEOWOW partners to test their approach and upgrades in practice. One of these, known as the River Discharge Modelling and Validation Showcase, combined data from two organisations involved in the project: the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and the Global Runoff Data Centre.
“This application enables users of the GEOSS portal to access both observed and predicted river discharge data,” Van Bemmelen explains. “We developed tools allowing users to visualise and compare the two types of data, for example to assess the accuracy of results produced by mathematical models.”
…of water and weather data
GEOWOW also advanced developments in support of the United Nation’s Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). This use case was more particularly taken forward by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, which was a partner in the project and acts as the host agency for the GOOS.
The project improved use of various ecosystem Essential Ocean Variables reflecting the state of the oceans. It then developed visualisation tools combining these data streams with other sources of marine data, emphasising key aspects, and providing easy access to these datasets, Van Bemmelen reports. The indicators and data generated as part of this particular case study were made available in the decision support web portal OneSharedOcean.org, also built by GEOWOW.
Further project activity was dedicated to promoting free and open data, i.e. data that are not subject to access restrictions. This work centred on the GEOSS Data Collection of Open Resources for Everyone (GEOSS Data-CORE). “We tried to make a maximum of open data resources available to the users,” Van Bemmelen reports.
GEOWOW ended in August 2014, having completed its mission to advance interoperability in GEOSS, Van Bemmelen reports. Its achievements are feeding into a new research effort, he adds: the Ecopotential project has set out to make earth observation and monitoring data exploitable for ecosystem modelling and services.
