The purpose of this INTEROP proposal is to facilitate the deployment of an Integrated Ecosystem Approach (IEA) to management in the Northeast and California Current Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs). The direct result of the proposed activity will be application-level data and information enhanced communication for developing the consensus networks to define the specific components of interest to support the implementation of NOAA?s Driver-Pressure-State-Impact Response framework (DPSIR) decision framework and the cyberinfrastructure technologies to ensure data interoperability and reuse. This new capability will serve as the essential foundation for the formal synthesis and quantitative analysis of information on relevant natural and socio?economic factors in relation to specified ecosystem management goals which can be applied in other LMEs.
The scope of the network includes key stakeholders in four areas: scientists and data providers, agencies, national communities of practice, and decision makers/ policy developers. The network will undertake major activities at the core team working level; technical sessions and focused workshops within each of the stakeholder areas as well as across and among the areas. Integrative activities, aligned with existing NSF-funded interoperability focused projects, community conferences and meetings will provide dissemination and broad engagement opportunities. Also key to the network activities is semantically rich use case development using expertise in semantic web methodologies, especially related to diverse vocabulary needs across the stakeholder areas.
Explicit in this project is the very broad dissemination of results; the diverse major stakeholders include decision and policy makers both at the agency and government levels as well as agency scientists and managers. The developed semantics based on leveraging existing standard vocabularies is likely to have very broad interest and use and enable extended interoperability across many disciplines. The very nature of open (semantically-enabled) data frameworks is that they receive substantial unintended use with the potential to provide substantial infrastructure improvements for research and education.
The potential benefits to society at large in terms of providing a routine and sustainable IEA that is linked to decisions and policy along with the feedbacks to the underlying monitoring and data collection cannot be under estimated. This project provides a pilot toward a robust and sustainable implementation for new national agendas such as those contained in the U.S. National Ocean Policy (July 2010).
ECO-OP 1. Project outcomes In order to understand and compare the relative impacts of fishing efforts, climate change, and natural cycles on marine ecosystems, many different types of data must be collected, integrated, and interpreted. Data collected for an integrated marine assessment (IEA) may be as diverse as satellite-derived sea surface temperature, counts of zooplankton species from net tows, and landings data from commercial fisheries. To make sense of such a plethora of data, it is common practice to choose a select subset of "indicators" of environmental or ecosystem status that can be monitored for trends or changes over time and space. Indicators tend to be derived datasets and "synthesized products" (borrowing a term from NOAA Information Quality Guidelines), often the result of complex data processing workflows that integrate not only data and models but also subjective choices made by scientists based on knowledge in their domain. Interpretations of indicators, made by natural and social scientists, then are shared in reports and online to other scientists, managers and policy makers, and to the public. An ultimate goal of the INTEROP ECO-OP project was to support the implementation of a Driver-Pressure-State-Impact Response (DPSIR) decision framework and the cyberinfrastructure technologies to ensure data interoperability and reuse. The INTEROP ECO-OP project addressed several aspects of the technical and social challenges involved in compiling, interpreting, and reporting an IEA. To develop cyberinfrastructure for IEAs in a tight collaboration between academic and government scientists and software developers, we utilized Rensselaer’s Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) Semantic Web Methodology, in which a "use case" defines the interactions between the people, the software, and the desired data products. Use cases are used to scope the challenges, adopt technologies, and evaluate software prototypes. We initiated use cases for IEAs for large marine ecosystems on the Pacific (California Current) and Atlantic (Northeast U.S. Shelf) coasts, and ultimately focused on two use cases in a partnership between Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Ecosystem Assessment Program at NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC). One of our focus use cases was to efficiently generate figures and tables representing ecosystem data and information products for the bi-annual NEFSC Ecosystem Status Report (ESR). We iterated through the TWC Methodology three times, involving two evaluations of the software developed. Ultimately, our software reproduced the figures for a number of climate and environmental indicators and went so far as to reproduce the Climate Forcing chapter of the ESR, a prototype for the remaining chapters of the ESR. We also explored additional challenges presented by some of the ecosystem and fisheries indicators and offered training sessions to improve workflows. Our second use case focused on the provenance, or lineage, of the derived data products. Our goal was to provide standardized metadata for data products, so that a human (and, ultimately, in the future, a machine) could trace back to the source observational data and models used to compile an indicator. We chose to examine the W3C PROV Data Model, approved in 2013, and adopted the PROV-O ontology in our ECO-OP ontology. The ontology engineering included some classes specific to the technologies chosen in the ECO-OP project (e.g., the use of IPython Notebooks for data processing and visualization) but also some general principles which helped shape the ontology for the Global Change Information System (GCIS) for the U.S. National Climate Assessment. Our ontology work includes best practices for semantic provenance for indicators in marine ecosystem assessments. The developed semantics leverages existing standard vocabularies and will have very broad interest and use and enable extended interoperability across many disciplines. The very nature of open (semantically-enabled) data frameworks is that they receive substantial unintended use with the potential to provide substantial infrastructure improvements for research and education. The potential benefits to society at large in terms of providing a routine and sustainable IEA that is linked to decisions and policy along with the feedbacks to the underlying monitoring and data collection cannot be under estimated. This project provided a pilot toward a robust and sustainable implementation for new national agendas such as those contained in the U.S. National Ocean Policy (July 2010). 2. Publications and Products. All software for the project resides in https://github.com/tetherless-world/ecoop and https://scm.escience.rpi.edu/svn/public. The iPython Notebook software is a primary product (DOI pending) available thru GitHub - https://github.com/tetherless-world/ecoop/tree/master/pyecoop. Another primary product is the ECOOP Provenance Capture Ontology prov-ecoop - https://github.com/tetherless-world/ecoop/tree/master/prov, which will be the subject of an Earth Science Informatics journal Software Article, and will be deposited in the ESIP ontology repository- http://semanticportal.esipfed.org/ontologies. 3. Additional information Our results are being prepared for publication in peer-reviewed journals. We also shared our preliminary results at national conferences including the Ocean Sciences Meeting, the American Geophysical Union Fall Meetings, NOAA’s Environmental Data Management Conference, Coastal Zones Conference and the Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research Conference.
