Bringing GEOSS Services into Practice: A Capacity Building Resource on Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI)

Abstract

Data discoverability, accessibility, and integration are frequent barriers for scientists and a major obstacle for favorable results on environmental research. To tackle this issue, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) is leading the development of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), a voluntary effort that connects Earth Observation resources world-wide, acting as a gateway between producers and users of environmental data. GEO recognizes the importance of capacity building and education to reach large adoption, acceptance and commitment on data sharing principles to increase the capacity to access and use Earth Observations data. This article presents “Bringing GEOSS services into practice” (BGSIP), an integrated set of teaching material and software to facilitate the publication and use of environmental data through standardized discovery, view, download, and processing services, further facilitating the registration of data into GEOSS. So far, 520 participants in 10 countries have been trained using this material, leading to numerous Spatial Data Infrastructure implementations and 1,000 tutorial downloads. This workshop lowers the entry barriers for both data providers and users, facilitates the development of technical skills, and empowers people

Building an Earth Observations Data Cube: lessons learned from the Swiss Data Cube (SDC) on generating Analysis Ready Data (ARD)

“…For example, applying machine learning techniques can be valuable to enhance extraction of information and classification (Camps-Valls, 2009;Lary, Alavi, Gandomi, & Walker, 2016). Additionally, DC being a new promising technology, capacity building efforts should be considered to ensure both technology transfer and to enable users to become familiar with this technology and raise awareness on how this can be useful in leveraging the potential of EO data (Desconnets et al, 2017;Giuliani et al, 2016).…”

Performance Testing of istSOS under High Load Scenarios

“…As a general remark, the authors underline the fact that the QoS limits set for INSPIRE's download service are designed to serve data to generally support the formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and activities, which have a direct or indirect impact on the environment. In this regard, this research has demonstrated that istSOS is suitable for most of the scientific or operational applications where data are accessed by tens of users with peaks of one hundred in emergency cases [14,39]. However, it also demonstrated that its capacity of scaling with increasing size of monitoring network, either in term of number of stored observations or sensors, is limited.…”

Lifting the Information Barriers to Address Sustainability Challenges with Data from Physical Geography and Earth Observation

“…In order to provide quality and timely data to inform evaluation and decision processes, existing Earth Observation infrastructures must be improved. Data sharing is explored in the Black Sea catchment with Geonode, which is an Open Source Geospatial Content Management System [18] and Bringing GEOSS services into practice capacity, which is a capacity-building material that aims at teaching how to configure, use, and deploy a set of open source software to set up a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) [19]. Once data are acquired and shared, it can be more easily processed.…”