Governance Issues

Governance Dimensions of data access infrastructures

Rob Atkinson

Social Change Online

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Governance

Policy

Design

Technology

Implementation

Cost-effectiveness of components established

Design has to be informed by governance(policy implementation) but also by implementation

Governance of components:•Catalogues•Common Models•Service Level Agreements

Technology can be driven by policy

Lessons Learned

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Overview

Business Realities

Standards Lifecycles

Semantic interoperability

Within-domain consistency

Cross-domain enablement

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Business Realities

Scalable infrastructures must be adopted to be successful

One or two infrastructure paradigms per “node”

Current capabilities maintained

New ones trialled

Must be no significant barriers to adoption

Technical complexity of system vs simplicity of managing a node

Critical mass and community expectation ultimately wins

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Business Realities

•Fear of change is overwhelming

Even when change is an acknowledged necessity!

•No solution is deployed, so all face scepticism

•Needs to provide obvious value

But more importantly needs to be seen as the simplest route for individual players

•Commitment of major players required

But within a governance framework that others are comfortable with

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Business Realities

It’s the future that matters

Is it a business risk to go a particular route?

But the future is viewed through the present..

Are safe, productive, easy steps being offered?

Is there a commitment and capacity to manage infrastructure?

Is it adaptable and scalable?

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Standards

Standards

Layer upon layer…

Encapsulate the “hard yards” into easy to use components

Easy to use only if the complete standards stack supported by quality implementations

Often multiple competing options

Usually due to poor separation of concerns

Typically forced to use a “poor” (ad-hoc) encoding because it’s the only semantic framework available…

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Standards Lifecycle

Existing practice

Identified need to harmonise and extend

Roadmap

delegation to working group

Drafts

Revision

Testing

Adoption as baseline

Update strategy

Deprecation

Decommissioning

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Semantic Interoperability

No über-model exists

Communities of practice Commitment and business drivers

Re-usability and utility

Existence of a governance structure

Semantics are declared not inferred “This WCS serves MODIS data”

MODIS is not self-describing!

Semantics implemented as a result of delegation Delegate spatial semantics to OGC

IHO defines maritime navigation features IHO delegates to ISO content standards

Etc

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Within-domain consistency

Achieved by reuse of semantic elements

By declaration

The good news:

Reuse is easy for lazy people

Productive people are “strategically lazy”

Reuse means power Standard nuts and bolts means powered tools are economically

feasible

Graphics libraries means games programmers don’t need to know much 3D geometry

Factor metadata around governance

Governance enables reuse!

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Practical considerations

No rocket science

Clearly delineate roles with respect to necessarily reusable artefacts

The entity creating a data server might be the person who defines the data specification

OGC specs tend to assume it is (IMHO a simplification that causes a complex problem)

But in general, interoperability demands that the definition is agreed in a broader community

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

The “USER” will “DISCOVER” “DATA” and “ACCESS” it.

Means a lot of work somewhere…

We can model (and implement!) what is required

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

ud Use Case Model

Data Product Specification Manager

Data Contributor

Data Product User

«Publish»Usage Note

Establish Serv er

«Publish»Serv ice Metadata

Discov er Data (DIS)

Access data (ACC)

«Publish»Data Access

Query Templates

«Publish»Vocabularies

Visualise Data

«Publish»Presentation Rules

«Publish»Schema

«Publish»Context

(Quickmap)

Standards Coordinator

«Publish»Serv ice Profile

«Publish»Finder

Application Manager Domain Expert

«include»

«include»

«extend»

«realize»

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

What it means

Infrastructure must:

Define (or adopt) component standards (schemas for metadata artefacts)

Deploy capable components

Define governance arrangements – how are these roles assigned

Be a viable business proposition to participate

As one of a very few active participations!

Broker interoperability with other infrastructures

Have a strategy to adapt and adopt new expectations

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Case study: biological observations

Typical query:

What threatened species have been recorded in area X?

a “join” is required between separately managed sources of information:

Taxonomy – terms, synonyms and hierarchy

Grouping – e.g. status according to Schedule A

Records

Spatial constraint

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Join-in-situ at Data Access Service

Data AccessService

Term(s)

Grouping type

Term List(preferred)

Record Set(with synonyms,

Groupings,Preferred terms)

SynonymsUsed

Groupings

Records

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Query..

Taxonomy

Term(s)

Grouping type

Record Set(with inconsistent

local synonyms only)

GroupingPreferred Term(s)

(for grouping)

Taxonomy

Preferred Term(s)

Terms and synonyms

Data AccessServiceRegister

Local synonyms

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Response…

Extract termsTaxonomy(Grouping)Term(s)

If results to be presented according to grouping – e.g. Threatened, Vulnerable etcGroupings

per term

TaxonomyService

Term List(with preferred terms identified)

Sort results

Record Set(with synonyms)

Presented Results

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Over Hurdle 1…..

Automate update of terms, from point of-truth services:

TaxonomyServiceClient

Term List(preferred)

SynonymsUsed

Groupings

Records

Grouping

Taxonomy

harvest

update

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Wrappers around “immutable” data sources:

WrapperTerm(s)

Grouping typeTerm List(preferred)

Record Set(with synonyms,

Groupings,Preferred terms)

Synonyms

Groupings

Records

Data AccessService

TaxonomyServiceClient

Grouping

Taxonomy

Synonyms usedA vocab from dataService – must matchSynonyms in taxonomy

High-bandw

idthlink

AUKEGGS workshop, Edinburgh Sept 2005

Solution success criteria

Meets requirements

can be extended to encompass more data services

can be extended by new ways of looking at the data

data is as simply re-usable as possible

has clear and achievable governance requirements

promises reasonable performance

can be implemented in a partial solution initially

provides mechanisms for improving data consistency over time