TOWARDS A GLOBAL E-INFRASTRUCTURE AND DATA MANAGEMENT PLAN
In 2012, the Belmont Forum held a series of public town hall meetings, and a two-day scoping meeting of scientists and program officers, which concluded that transformative approaches and innovative technologies are needed for heterogeneous data/information to be integrated, made interoperable, explored and repurposed by researchers in disparate fields and for myriad uses across international, institutional, disciplinary, spatial and temporal boundaries. Pooling Belmont Forum members’ resources to bring communities together for further integration, cooperation, and leveraging of existing initiatives and resources has the potential to develop the e-infrastructure framework necessary to solve pressing environmental problems. The plan is expected to serve as the foundation of a future Belmont Forum call for proposals for e-Infrastructures and Data Management.
The Belmont Forum is uniquely able to align resources of major national funders to support global environmental change research on specific technical and governance challenges, and the development of focused pilot systems that could be complementary to other initiatives such as GEOSS, ICSU World Data Centre and Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS).
The development of this Belmont Forum Knowledge Hub represents an extraordinary effort to bring together international leaders in interoperability, standards development, governance and other fields pertinent to decision-support systems in global environmental change research.