Worked examples: Global Change Information System and Quality, Uncertainty and
Bias Representations of Atmospheric Remote Sensing Information Products
Peter Fox, and … others
Xinformatics 4400/6400
Week 12, April 23, 2013
And yet, we are still not done..
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7mYclB2oypk/TWrlhBPvHxI/AAAAAAAAALc/mwjhBbuZ9kU/s1600/yawn4.jpg
The Global Change Research Act and USGCRP
• USGCRP was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) of 1990 (P.L. 101 – 606)
“To provide for development and coordination of a comprehensive and integrated United States Research Program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.”
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• Coordinates Federal research to better understand and prepare the nation for global change
• Prioritizes and supports cutting edge scientific work in global change
• Assesses the state of scientific knowledge and the Nation’s readiness to respond to global change
• Communicates research findings to inform, educate, and engage the global community
The Program:
U.S. Global Change Research Program
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Global Change Information System(GCIS)
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Vision:
A unified web based source of authoritative, accessible, usable, and timely information about climate and global change for use by scientists, decision makers, and the public.
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Global Change Research Act (1990), Section 106…not less frequently than every 4 years, the Council… shall prepare… an assessment which–• integrates, evaluates, and interprets the
findings of the Program and discusses the scientific uncertainties associated with such findings;
• analyzes the effects of global change on the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity; and
• analyzes current trends in global change, both human- induced and natural, and projects major trends for the subsequent 25 to 100 years.
Previous National Climate Assessments
Climate Change Impacts on the United States (2000)
Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States (2009)
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Target date for next NCA: 2013
http://nca2009.globalchange.gov
NCA 2009
http://nca2009.globalchange.gov
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AND THEN CLIMATE-GATE HAPPENED!
Prototype Use Case
Name Discover and visit data center website of dataset used to generate report figure.
Goal The NCA Report reader sees a figure and wants to know where the data came from.
Summary A reader of the NCA is browsing the content via the website. He/she sees a figure and wants to know where the data came from. A reference to the publication in which the figure originated appears in the figure caption. Selecting the link to the source publication displays a page of information about the publication including, if available, the publication DOI. The page also includes references to the datasets cited in the publication. Following each of dataset reference links presents a page of information about the dataset, including links back to the agency/data center webpage describing the dataset in more detail and making the actual data available for order or download.
Actors Primary Actor - reader of the NCA
Preconditions Reader is viewing the NCA online report
Post Conditions Reader visits the data center dataset website
Normal Flow 1) System is presenting the NCA report to the reader in a web site. Presentation includes report figure with caption that includes reference to source publication.
2) Reader selects publication reference in figure caption3) System displays information about publication, including DOI (if available).4) Publication information includes publication dataset citations.5) Reader selects a dataset cited by the publication.6) System displays information about dataset including links to agency / data center webpages where more
information and (potentially) data download links are available.7) Reader selects the data center link and is redirected to data center dataset webpage.
Discove
r and vi
sit data ce
nter websit
e of datase
t use
d to generate re
port figure.
Assessment links to information
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Traceable accounts…
11Magic here !
Under the hood – a graph
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Key Message & A Traceable Account
Key Message vs. “General” Message
Prototype 1
• Initial Implementation of UC-1• Exposes Linked Data API
– RESTful– RDF/XML, TTL, HTML, JSON supported
• Hosted at TWC / RPI– currently placeholder data – http://globalchange.tw.rpi.edu/elda/gcis/report/nc
a2009.html• Implemented using Epimorphics Linked Data
API (ELDA)– http://code.google.com/p/linked-data-api/ (spec)– https://code.google.com/p/elda/ (implementation)
Linked Data API Architecture
Prototype Screenshot
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GCIS
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GCIS
• Create an entity from the structured metadata about each thing – tag with related concepts.
• Identify it with a persistent, controlled identifier.
• Present with a human readable web page and a machine interface.
• Represent all relationships between items.
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GCIS and W3C ProvFor GCIS, we have agents (people, projects, agencies, data centers, publishers, etc.) who are associated with activities (measuring, deriving, modeling, analyzing, authoring, publishing, archiving, distributing, visualizing, etc. ) the entities (software, data, images, figures, papers, reports, etc.) related to global change.
We assign local identifiers to each (so we can persistently resolve them) and capture and represent their relationships.
If possible, we link with external authorities:agency data centers, journal publishers,Researcher ID (researcherid.com) or ORCID (orcid.org).
Computer science-y things
actedOnBehalf
ENTITY
AGENT
wasAttributedTo
wasAssociatedWith
wasInformedBywasDerivedFrom
wasGeneratedBy
used
startedAtTime,endedAtTime
ACTIVITY
Diagram from W3C PROV group and Ivan Herman
Non-specialist Use Case
Name Find Latest Datasets by Keyword
Goal Search for datasets associated with the keyword “snow”, list search results by recentness of publication.
Summary User story:
I want to look for information concerning “snow.” I don’t know if it is a CLEAN word or a GCMD word or don’t even know what GCMD or CLEAN is. How would I do it, and what would I see on my monitor during the process?
Assumptions The reader is not assumed to have knowledge regarding the GCMD Keywords (or other) vocabulary.
Actors Primary Actor - reader of the NCA
Preconditions TBD
Post Conditions Reader is presented with a list of datasets associated with the keyword “snow” sorted by dataset publication date.
Normal Flow TBD
Notes We are looking into two user interface options for dataset selection by keyword
1) As a free-text search where the user inputs “snow”.2) Present the user a faceted browse interface with a vocabulary faceted which presents the user with terms from a
structured vocabulary. The user can manually select the term(s) which match or contain “snow”.
We intend to implement prototypes of both.
Free-text Search by Keyword (ELDA)
Faceted Browser (S2S)
VocabularyFacet
Data typeFacet
Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN)
• http://cleanet.org/index.html• The CLEAN project, a part of the National Science
Digital Library, provides a reviewed collection of resources coupled with the tools to enable an online community to share and discuss teaching about climate and energy science.
• Science Vocabularies for middle school to undergraduate students
• Vocabularies hosted at http://serc.carleton.edu/admin/manage/view_vocab.php?vocab_id=161
CLEAN Vocabulary
CLEAN Vocabulary (cont.)
CLEAN Vocabulary (cont.)
Interagency Information Integration
GCIS can use relationships between all relevant information about global change across the agencies:oFrom observations to datasets to research papers to models
to analyses to organizations to people to synthesized reports to human impacts...
oDetermine agency interdependencies -- An EPA analysis uses a NOAA model dependent on observations from a NASA satellite.
oCan present unique interagency metrics "How many papers referenced datasets from a specific satellite?"
oDirect users back to agency data centers for more detailed information and the actual content and data.
GCIS “Data Mining”
Structured information with relationships allows integrated data mining, searching, metrics.o What projects provided data used to produce figures that
were referenced in the 2013 NCA section about coastal sea level rise impacts?
o Which data centers hold data referenced by papers related to forests in the midwest?
o Which agencies have people working on projects related to societal impacts of extreme weather events?
o Show me the latest papers about health impacts of air quality in California. Which datasets were used in the analysis of air quality in California?
