GEOINFORMATICS IN THE 21ST CENTURY: IDENTIFYING PRIORITY TECHNOLOGIES TO MEET SOCIETAL CHALLENGES

Over the next several decades, the importance of geosciences in facilitating ‘science of global proportions' such as climate change, natural hazards and resources including drinking water will require discovery, integration and analysis of vast amounts of data distributed around the world. The present infrastructure does not facilitate the use of the web, or the emerging semantic web because of its focus on technologies rather than content and knowledge management. We utilize the Wyborn Informatics Terahedra (Wyborn, 2007) to emphasize the “resources-knowledge paradox”. The resources associated with computing power, bandwidth, and tools have not translated into its normal outcome: better content and more scientific knowledge. To many, the amount of coherent data we can access and integrate in machine readable forms is the limiting factor.We believe the main impediment in data discovery and integration has been the lack of semantics to enable machines to “understand” and “automatically” process the data that they now merely display through syntactic data interoperability (e.g. common data format). We suggest that syntactic interoperability can be readily advanced through the use of markup languages such as the GeoSciML initiative which provides a conceptual model of geological maps, and those developed for hydrology, images, elements etc. We suggest developing mark-up languages (ML) for other geoscience disciplines to standardize the structure (syntax) of the exchanged information, and further mapping them to geoscience data ontologies should be a priority in geoinformatics research. The use of the emerging Semantic Web is expected to offer data, organized through ontologies, and applications, exposed as Web services, enabling their understanding, sharing, and invocation by automated tools. In order to utilize such web based data systems, we present the current status of an ontology based engine (DIA) as well as a semantically enabled data registration engine (SEDRE) designed to provide earth scientists the capability to better integrate data towards knowledge discovery.