Approaches and tools for user-driven provenance and data quality information in spatial data infrastructures

Geospatial data are fundamental in most global-change and sustainability-related domains.However,readily accessible information on data quality and provenance is often missing or hardly accessible for users due to technical or perceptual barriers,for example,due to unstructured metadata information or missing references.Within an interdisciplinary process encompassing perspectives of data users,data producers,and software developers,we identified major needs to facilitate effectivefitness-for-use assessments by data users and developed approaches to address these.We provided a stylized analysis of large-scale land use data to showcase selected approaches.To support data users,interoperable quality and provenance information need to be meaningfully represented.Data producers need efficient workflows and tools supporting them in creating high-quality,structured and detailed quality and provenance information.Our newly developed approaches to increase the availability of structured metadata synthesize new and existing tools to extract metadata or to generate provenance data during processing.Within our approaches to improve interoperability and accessibility we present novel tools to support(i)the creation of curated and linked registers of data quality indicators and thematic terms,and(ii)linked visualization of data quality and provenance information.Following our approaches increases transparency,facilitatesfitness-for-use assessments,and ultimately improves research quality.

Scientific geodata infrastructures: challenges, approaches and directions

Based on various experiences in developing Geodata Infrastructures(GDIs)for scientific applications,this article proposes the concept of a Scientific GDI that can be used by scientists in environmental and earth sciences to share and disseminate their research results and related analysis methods.Scientific GDI is understood as an approach to tackle the science case in Digital Earth and to further enhance e-science for environmental research.Creating Scientific GDI to support the research community in efficiently exchanging data and methods related to the various scientific disciplines forming the basis of environmental studies poses numerous challenges on today’s GDI developments.The paper summarizes requirements and recommendations on the publication of scientific geospatial data and on functionalities to be provided in Scientific GDI.Best practices and open issues for governance and policies of a Scientific GDI are discussed and are concluded by deriving a research agenda for the next decade.

ClimateCharts.net-an interactive climate analysis web platform

This article describes the conception and implementation of a web platform which uses special charts and maps for climate monitoring and analysis.At first it gives an overview of related web applications and their advantages and limitations.This is followed by a basic introduction of current technologies and methods for working with climate data,geospatial web services and visualization techniques.Finally,the implementation based on prior defined requirements is presented and its strengths and limitations are discussed.The application provides several basic charts for climate analysis,as well as a more complex one which uses a standardized visualization concept which is suitable for comparing different local climates(Walter-LiethStandard).The charts are based on different interpolated datasets with global coverage as well as data from the Global Historical Climate Network(GHCN).Overall,the application enables users to generate individual historical climate charts from the beginning of the twentieth century until present day.

Ad-hoc combination and analysis of heterogeneous and distributed spatial data for environmental monitoring-design and prototype of a web-based solution

With regard to a multi-dimensional and multi-facetted implementation of the vision of a Digital Earth,capabilities to combine and analyze heterogeneous spatial data sources on the web are becoming increasingly important.In this article,an online system is conceptualized and implemented to facilitate spatial data analysis and decision making specifically for environmental applications.It supports a dynamic search and binding of suitable geoprocessing functionality with respect to the given input data and target description.Geoprocessing patterns are used to create an application-oriented abstraction layer on top of generic geoprocessing services available on the web.As an application scenario the determination and quality assessment for water body structures is taken.For this use case authoritative data,remote sensing imagery and citizen science data gets combined to gain a comprehensive picture of the various spatial,temporal and thematic aspects influencing the quality of inland waters.The prototypical implementation makes use of open standards to facilitate the integration with existing spatial data infrastructures.

Innovation in geoprocessing for a Digital Earth

Online geoprocessing,the provision and the use of spatial analysis functionality on the Web,is a powerful technological approach to fully realise the vision of a Digital Earth.The Digital Earth objectives include the integration of information across diverse domains in order to address environmental and societal challenges as well as the interactive and exploratory provision of information to a wide audience(Craglia et al.2008).