ENVISIONING A GEOINFORMATICS INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE EARTH SCIENCES: TECHNOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL CHALLENGES

Since its inception in 2000, Geoinformatics has been envisioned as serving all the earth sciences and enabling the understanding of complex systems. For the past six years the earth and computer science community has struggled with clearly defining the path to that vision, obtaining sufficient resources, maintaining interest across the broad spectrum of scientists that Geoinformatics intends to serve, and achieving coordination and interaction among scientists nationally and internationally. There is hope however, that we are approaching a true turning point in Geoinformatics, that has as its hallmark, a general convergence on a suite of technologies and concepts that could begin the process of growing an integrated infrastructure.

Several major technology experiments and community database efforts are beginning to bear fruit and numerous workshops and town halls have garnered unprecedented interest and agreement in the community. The development of GeoSciML by the Interoperability Working Group of the Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI), a commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) is one such break-through. GeoSciML is a geoscience specific XML-based GML (Geography Markup Language) application that supports interchange of geoscience information. In recent testing, it demonstrated that it could be used to provide the interoperability needed to bring disparate geologic maps together. A number of efforts such as the EarthChem Portal, GEON: The Geosciences Network, and the North American Geologic Map Data Model showed that community databases, standards, and ontologies can be created and implemented cooperatively. The well-attended Geoinformatics Town Hall at the American Geophysical Union Meeting in December 2006 was among the first to articulate a national and potentially international collaboration across the community (Fox and others, 2006).

In early 2007, several workshops occurred among geological surveys nationally and internationally, and an NSF workshop among Geoinformatics practitioners was held. Collectively these workshops have resulted in a more definitive vision and convergence around a few key concepts and technologies. Common elements defined in these workshops describe an infrastructure that is distributed, interoperable, uses open source standards and common protocols, respects and acknowledges data ownership, enables science, fosters communication and collaboration, shares resources and expertise, and develops community databases, new web services, and clients that are sustained over time.

Each of these concepts and technological choices agreed upon in these workshops offers a myriad of challenges that will now have to be analyzed and resolutions agreed upon. To do this will take a sustained effort, supported by government, industry, and academia. It will involve carefully and thoughtfully implementing a real “community of practice” (Wenger 1998) in Geoinformatics.

In a recent NSF workshop report (Edwards and others, 2007) the authors state that “Infrastructure is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally. Because infrastructure is big, layered, and complex, and because it means different things locally, it is never changed from above. Changes take time and negotiation, and adjustment with other aspects of the systems involved.” The authors also describe the evolution of systems to true infrastructure. They define an evolving spectrum that starts with a single system that is centrally organized and controlled; to networks that link systems with control partially or wholly distributed among the system nodes; to internetworks (or webs) that are networks of networks based on coordination rather than control. These internetworks represent true infrastructure and require communities of practice to coordinate and implement. Currently, many systems are being built and ad hoc gateways constructed to link systems without much coordination.

Communities of practice are not limited to a community with a common interest or “domain,” but can encompass practitioners who share experiences and learn from each other across domains. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, vocabularies, and ways of addressing recurring problems. Coordination as well as standards of practice and reference materials grow out of this experience. The critical benefits of communities of practice include creating and sustaining knowledge, leveraging of resources, and rapid learning and innovation. Not only will communities of practice help grow the cyberinfrastructure needed to understand and analyze complex systems, but will promote the other essential ingredient –communication among scientists. The primary barrier to integrated science is the difficulty in translating the vocabulary of one scientific field to another. A geomorphologist who understands the control geology has on the health of vegetation in a riparian habitat has significant difficulty translating this information to the ecologist specializing in bird mortality. Simply making data interoperable will not create an infrastructure for the earth sciences to conduct analyses of complex systems. It will take a sustained, long term, focused effort across the earth sciences and computer sciences to build the tools: databases, gateways,webservices,and applications and change the culture: common vocabularies, data sharing, and open source standards.

Edwards, P. N., Jackson, S. J., Bowker, G. C., Knobel, C.P. (2007), Report of a Workshop on History & Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures, NSF Grant 0630263, 55p.

Fox, P., L. Gundersen, K. Lehnert, D. McGuinness, K. Sinha, and W. Snyder (2006), At the Fall Meeting: Toward Broad Community Collaboration in Geoinformatics, Eos Trans. AGU, 87(46), 513.

Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge University Press, 336p.