SELFIE Second Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment Alistair Ritchie Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research, New Zealand CEOS Working Group on Information Systems & Services 11 October 2019 Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium Overview Introductions History ELFIE the Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment SELFIE the Second Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment Review and Future directions Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Introductions Canadian Geological Survey Federation University of Australia BRGM, France DataCove QUASHI, US CEH, UK NASA JPL CSIRO, Australia Open Geospatial Consortium Earth Science Information Partnership, US David Blodgett (USA) United States Geological Survey Initiative Lead Alistair Ritchie (NZL) Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research Technical Lead Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium History The ELFIE work has it origins in every individual’s experience deploying distributed data services The OGC Soil Data Interoperability Experiment is a good example of a motivator Initiated by the IUSS Working Group on Soil Information Standards Approximately 10 active participating agencies Reconciling 5 existing soil data exchange standards Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Demonstration – Soil profiles and descriptions History - Soil Data IE Demonstration – Soil profiles and descriptions Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

History - Soil Data IE WFS WPS SOS Registry PID Service Client WCS WMS Maps Sensor Data Soil Data Execute PTFs Gridded Data HTTP URIs (conneg) Vocabularies Soil Taxonomies Observable Properties WFS WPS SOS Registry PID Service Client WCS WMS Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

History - Soil Data IE Results Created a simple information model of soils data Harmonised the structure and some content of soils data between agencies Brought data from different soil agencies together in applications for users (interoperability) Provided a way to describe and organise soil concepts, features, methods, etc (semantics) Nothing new here … problem is not technical but social (acceptance) Success through use of unusual tools with a parochial (soil-focussed) approach Started a conversation with Dave Blodgett at the USGS How do we link together all of our environmental data? How do we do it in a way that is ‘the HTML for environmental data’? Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

‘How Why do we link together all of our environmental data?’ To understand, manage and use the environment we must understand it as a whole, not just the parts Cross-domain science Integrating data from multiple domains Lower the data integration overhead Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

‘…the HTML for environmental data…’ What does that even mean? HTML is pervasive web technology and used without thought or controversy. OGC X(G)ML and web services are widely regarded as a Bad Thing REST and JSON are a Good Thing (Depending on your perspective.) It’s a pointless argument … there’s no one way of doing things … but imagine … … easy discovery of, and access to, widely distributed data Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Environmental Linked Feature Interoperability Experiment ‘Demonstrate the use of existing and pending OGC standards for the encoding of environmental observation data in an integrated dataset of features linked according to ReSTful and Linked Data principles.’ From: https://github.com/opengeospatial/ELFIE Initiators: U.S. Geological Survey (US) Land Information New Zealand (NZ) BRGM (FR) Participants Horizons Regional Council (NZ) Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research (NZ) Natural Resources Canada (CA) ESRI (US) Tumbling Walls (US) Meta-linkage (AU) INSPIRE (EU) Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

ELFIE - Applying OGC/W3C Best Practices The engine … the ID and the link https://data.example.org/id/some-thing ‘ReST with discipline’ GeoJSON, Well Known Text, … KEEP IT SIMPLE! HTML landing pages with structured data mark-up Don’t rely on specialist registries or catalogue services Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

ELFIE - JSON-LD, JSON for the Semantic Web Need a disciplined approach – some way of standardizing content Properties Definitions Vocabularies Links (aka relations) JSON-LD Looks like JSON Linked/embedded ‘context’ Binds to RDF Schema/ OWL ontology Objects have @ids (URIs) Can be converted to RDF https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/ Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium Demonstration An overview of shiny ELFIE outcomes and linked environmental data is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GvyrpWQmUt-AEzwxWdJ_G9VcpltPzSc6/view My favourite demo uses the ELFIE search client. ELFIE search client downloads available at these locations: https://www.google.com/chrome/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/windows/microsoft-edge https://support.apple.com/downloads/safari https://brave.com/BLO342 https://www.google.com/search?q=web+broswer Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium ELFIE Resource SELFIE Resource (via OGC Feature API) Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

SELFIE – Considering Information Resources Non-information Resource Information Resource Meta Resource schema.org properties (indexing) representation links (to api, file, web service, …) feature links (spatial/temporal/domain topology) useful data (smart indexing) Data Resource the data different data resources according to: standard (e.g. GWML/GeoSciML) profile (specialize the standard) media type (HTML,JSON-LD,TTL,...) provider (Fed Uni, GSV...) https://x.self.ie/id/hole-int-ground https://y.self.ie/info/hole-int-ground https://... HTTP 303 https://... HTTP 200 https://... Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

SELFIE – Progress Non-information Resource Information Resource Meta Resource Data Resource Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium Review There isn’t, shouldn’t, be much to say. Our goal: you look at the implementation of an ELFIE-based system and say, ‘is that all there is?’ Ultimately the ELFIEs are as much a social as technical engineering exercise Our domain models and advanced APIs are marvellous and necessary, but We must support the ‘mass market’ We must provide a lightweight discovering mechanism. We are excited about the potential: of a traversable web of distributed data of users discovering useful tools and techniques (Geospatial APIs, the Semantic Web) through SELFIE ... it is the thin end of the wedge. Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Future Directions ELFIE-3? Not sure. Main question so far: Building testbed demonstrations (now) Review and compile an engineering report (March 2020) Run a post-SELFIE hackathon/un-conference to workshop future directions Main question so far: Where does ELFIE stop and an advanced set of APIs begin? ELFIE defines a lightweigh convenience API Let’s not compromise useful simplicity Suspect most spin off from ELFIE are in scope for more advanced APIs OGC Environmental Data Retreival API (proposed) https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/89625 Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium

Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium (EASY) QUESTIONS Reports, examples and demos at https://opengeospatial.github.io/ELFIE Working repository at https://github.com/opengeospatial/SELFIE/ Copyright © 2019 Open Geospatial Consortium