Area of activities - Information Technologies

1. XMDR project (Lawrence Berkeley/EPA)

• The eXtended Metadata Registry (XMDR) project is developing improved standards and technology for storing, managing and interrelating the semantics of data with the semantics of concept systems.

2. Thesaurus and terminology - Ecoterm (All)

• Joint international expert meetings to discuss terminolgy issues

• Web services - USGS and EEA pilots
  

• Thesaurus for environmental terms in international conventions and Global Environmental Facility - UNEP leads on next steps

• GEMET quality assurance and update

• Common exchange formats for terminologies shall be proposed

3. Water Information System for Europe - WISE (EEA/JRC)

• The WISE system is an operational project between the EU institutions involved in environemt. It builds a fully distributed data exchange and provision system on European water data and information by 2010. WISE utilises many modern IT technologies and is therefore an ideal application area for Ecoinformatics results. The USEPA office of water has expressed interest in collaborating. 

4. Common IT research activities

These activities will involve EPA and JRC as key players. EEA will communicate its interest in thematic areas to be supported through this work

It was discussed to include activities around the semantic web for environmental data and ontologies into this. The current European discussion and agreements around the Global Monitoring Environment and Security (GMES) initiative and the INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe (INSPIRE) initiative are a relevant framework. Consequently, spatial information and databases as well as a common information infrastructure for environmental data are an important reference set.

Primarily, the EU 6th framework IST program shall be evaluated for the European contribution while the US work will possibly have to be supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) funds.

5. Open Source ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registry (EEA/EPA)

• EEA develops and provides open source software. Expected date of initial availability is March 2004. The initial release will be a partial implementation of ISO/IEC 11179. Fuller implementations may follow.

• Initially post the open source software to EEA website. EEA already has several open source software packages available.

• EPA assists EEA with interpretation of the 11179 standards documents.

• EPA posts the publicly available ISO/IEC 11179 documents on the open source web location.

6. Register metadata and XML Schemas in a metadata registry (USGS/GBIF)

• GBIF has a federated data exchange standard in XML. Defining the data elements in the XML schemas and registering them in the 11179 registry is an interesting project. Possibly starting with the Darwin Core data.

• USGS will work with GBIF to develop and enter metadata for prioritized Darwin Core data elements.

• Share registry entries between agencies where relevant (all participants).

7. Sharing data via XML (All initially EPA, JRC)

• Share metadata about tags in XML Schemas (?tagsonomy?), tag sharing. JRC and UNEP are interested.

• EPA to post web address for current XML schemas

• EPA posts draft guidelines on EEA Circle (done during the meeting)

8. Indicator management tools

• Build on and extend Reportnet tool developments as already started by the listed organisations (EEA, GBIF, JRC)