Global Change Information System

Curt Tilmes, USGCRP/NASABrian Duggan, Steve Aulenbach, Justin Goldstein, USGCRP/UCAR

Andrew Buddenberg, NCA/TSU, NOAA/NCDC/CICSPeter Fox, Xiaogang Ma, Jin Guang Zheng, Linyun Fu, RPI/TWC

ESIP Federation Summer Meeting 2013

www.globalchange.gov

• 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 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.

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Global Change Information System(GCIS)

Long Term Vision:The Global Change Information System (GCIS) is intended to eventually become 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 Information System(GCIS)

Long Term Vision:The Global Change Information System (GCIS) is intended to eventually become 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.

Initial Prototype: Coincident with the release of the Third National Climate

Assessment (NCA) ,~March, 2014, the GCIS will support the distribution, presentation and documentation needs of the NCA, integrating that content into the USGCRP web site (globalchange.gov) and demonstrating the potential for GCIS to support the long term vision.

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GCIS

• globalchange.gov Web Portal “Front-End”– 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.

• Structured Data Server “Back-End”– Capture, Identify, Organize, Present and

Maintain metadata about authoritative Global Change Content Elements from across the Global Change Research Program

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Structured Data Server• Capture – Obtain from a variety of sources: manual input by

trusted parties – support staff, agency partners, data centers; automated harvesting from publishers, agency data centers, etc.

• Identify – Assign persistent, resolvable, controlled identifiers to each element.

• Organize – Capture, discover and represent relationships between elements, including across various types of elements; across data centers; and across agency boundaries.

• Present – Provide machine accessible interfaces to retrieve structured metadata, and to search/data mine it.

• Maintain – Develop tools and processes to ensure quality and integrity of database contents over time.

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Global Change Content Elements

• Reports, Figures, Images, Research Papers, Journals, Measurements, Datasets, Instruments, Agencies, Projects, People, Models, Algorithms, …

• Findings – “Climate is changing.” “Sea Level is Rising.”

• Concepts: “Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health” “Adaptation”

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(Draft!) Findings“Global sea level has risen by about 8 inches since reliable record keeping began in 1880. It is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by 2100.”

NCA 2013 Draft, Chapter 1 – Executive Summary (v. 11 Jan 2013)Figure 1.2: Sea Level Rise: Past, Present, Future

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(Draft!) Findings“Global sea level has risen by about 8 inches since reliable record keeping began in 1880. It is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by 2100.”

NCA 2013 Draft, Chapter 1 – Executive Summary (v. 11 Jan 2013)Figure 1.2: Sea Level Rise: Past, Present, Future

Where did this figure come from?Why should I trust it?

NCA links to GCIS entities

NCA 2013 Draft, Chapter 1 – Executive Summary (v. 11 Jan 2013)Figure 1.2: Sea Level Rise: Past, Present, Future

http://nca2013.globalchange.gov/executive_summary/fig1.2

http://globalchange.gov/dataset/GMSLTRS

4 Data Source (s) - Dataset #3 (green time series):

Producer:

Publication:

Nerem, R.S., D.P. Chambers, C. Choe, and G.T. Mitchum, 2010: Estimating mean sea level change from the TOPEX and Jason altimeter missions. Marine Geodesy, 33, 435-446 doi: 10.1080/01490419.2010.491031

http://globalchange.gov/instrument/TOPEXhttp://globalchange.gov/instrument/JASON-1

Instrument:Person:

http://globalchange.gov/person/Nerem_R_Shttp://globalchange.gov/person/Chambers_D_Phttp://globalchange.gov/person/Choe_Chttp://globalchange.gov/person/Mitchum_G_T

http://globalchange.gov/agency/CU_Sea_Level_Research_Group

University of Colorado CU Sea Level Research Group

Source: Josh Willis, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

http://globalchange.gov/publication/doi/10.1080/01490419.2010.491031

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?

GCIS Content Curation

… source of authoritative, accessible, usable and timely information about climate and global change for use by scientists, decision makers, and the public

GCIS Content Curation

Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Recommended Practice, CCSDS 650.0-M-2 (Magenta Book) Issue 2, June 2012

ISO 14721:2012

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DOI – Digital Object Identifiers

• DOIs have become the de facto standard for identifying scientific journal articles

• There are recent efforts to encourage their use for identifying datasets as well: NASA, NOAA, USGS, DOE, others?

• The OSTP “Big Earth Data Initiative” (BEDI) will be encouraging good identification, documentation and interoperability of datasets, starting with “high value” datasets, such as those used for the NCA..

• Good dataset identifiers are required for good data citations linking research with data.

• USGCRP will become a DOI registrant and will assign DOIs to the NCA report (or the chapters of the NCA)The DOI® System ISO 26324 10.1000/182

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ORCID – Identifiers for people

• Open Researcher & Contributor ID• http://orcid.org• “ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that

distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.”

• “Giving Credit where Credit is Due.”

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Structured Data Server RESTful API URLs are a subset of URIs in a formal ontology. URIs : Uniform identifiers for resources. Resources include : report, chapter, figure, image, article, journal,

finding, organization, person, dataset. Serves JSON, HTML, N-Triples for a resource using content-negotiation

(“Accept: application/json”) or suffixes (“GET http://…/foo.json”)

GETting N-triples returns triples for which the current URL is the subject.

Relationships between resources are described using RDF predicates.

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Structured Data Server

Sample requests :

GET http://data.globalchange.gov/report/nca3/figure/us-

groundwater-aquifers.json

GET http://data.globalchange.gov/report/nca3/figure/us-

groundwater-aquifers.nt

GET http://data.globalchange.gov/report/nca3/chapter/water-

resources.nt

Sample relationships :

<chapter identifier> dc:isPartOf <report identifier>

<figure identifier> prov:wasDerivedFrom <dataset identifier>

<image identifier> prov:wasDerivedFrom <dataset identifier>

<chapter identifier> prov:wasAttributedTo <person identifier>

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Structured Data Server

http://data.globalchange.gov

gcis-api-users-group+subscribe@usgcrp.gov

Questions and Comments

For more information, visit http://globalchange.gov