Integrative Research: The EuroGEOSS Experience

Abstract

The implementation of the INSPIRE Directive in Europe and similar efforts around the globe to develop spatial data infrastructures and global systems of systems have been largely focusing on the adoption of agreed technologies, standards, and specifications to address the interoperability challenge. However, addressing the key scientific challenges of humanity in the 21st century requires a more comprehensive integrative research effort, which in turn may pose more complex requirements on the systems to be integrated, and increase the number of arrangements required to support them. This paper analyses the main challenges related to integrative interoperability, such as mutual understanding of requirements and methods, theoretical underpinning, and tacit knowledge. To illustrate our contribution to the integrative research, the paper proposes the flexible approach to interoperability, based on mediation and brokering, that has been implemented by the EuroGEOSS research project. It also demonstrates that this approach allows scientific and non-scientific stakeholders to overcome the increased complexity of the integration effort mentioned above and charts the trajectory for the evolution of current spatial data infrastructures.Index Terms-Geographic information systems, geoscience and remote sensing, integrative research, research initiatives.

Mind the Gap: Big Data vs. Interoperability and Reproducibility of Science

“…Multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity (i.e. involving not just other disciplines but also non-academic stakeholders, see Vaccari et al 2012), public participation and citizen science are crucial but only if already involved from the beginning, at the initial stage of framing the problem space (i.e. frame first, compute later).…”

“…Clearly, this has represented a high entry barrier for developing cross-disciplinary science and applications (Nativi et al 2013). For this reason, a new solution was proposed first by a European FP7 project (Vaccari et al 2012) and then by a US-NSF initiative (Nativi et al 2011), namely: the Brokering approach. The Brokering approach follows these principles to make existing infrastructures and data systems interoperable, in a System-of-Systems (SoS) framework (Nativi et al 2012a;2013): 1.…”

Exploring the depths of the global earth observation system of systems

“…A major conceptual breakthrough was adopted by the GEO Plenary in 2011 in the form of a brokering layer developed by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and partners in a European Funded R&D project called EuroGEOSS (www.eurogeoss.eu) (Nativi, Craglia, & Pearlman, 2012, 2013Vaccari, Craglia, Fugazza, Nativi, & Santoro, 2012). The starting point of this innovation, was the recognition and acceptance of the diversity of protocols, standards and professional practices of all the communities participating in GEOSS.…”

Geospatial information infrastructures to address spatial needs in health: Collaboration, challenges and opportunities

“…Specialized health services or applications can be then developed in less time, because required spatial functionalities are delegated to the underlying geospatial services. In this context, Vacarri et al [53] recently presented the EuroGEOSS broker vii , a web component based on brokering and mediation capabilities to facilitate uniform discovering and accessing to heterogeneous resources from diverse domains such as forestry, biodiversity, and drought. Extrapolating the EuroGEOSS brokering approach to health domain would be certainly feasible yet based on mediated and integrated data models as those commented in Section 3.1.…”