Global Change Information System Curt Tilmes, USGCRP/NASA Brian Duggan, Steve Aulenbach, Justin Goldstein, USGCRP/UCAR Andrew Buddenberg, NCA/TSU, NOAA/NCDC/CICS Peter Fox, Xiaogang Ma, Jin Guang Zheng, Linyun Fu, RPI/TWC ESIP Federation Summer Meeting

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 2

3 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.

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. 4

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. 5

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 6

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. 7

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” 8

(Draft!) Findings “Global sea level has risen by about 8 inches since reliable record keeping began in It is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by 2100.” 9 NCA 2013 Draft, Chapter 1 – Executive Summary (v. 11 Jan 2013) Figure 1.2: Sea Level Rise: Past, Present, Future

(Draft!) Findings “Global sea level has risen by about 8 inches since reliable record keeping began in It is projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet by 2100.” 10 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 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, doi: / Instrument: Person: University of Colorado CU Sea Level Research Group Source: Josh Willis, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Interagency Information Integration GCIS can use relationships between all relevant information about global change across the agencies: o From observations to datasets to research papers to models to analyses to organizations to people to synthesized reports to human impacts... o Determine agency interdependencies -- An EPA analysis uses a NOAA model dependent on observations from a NASA satellite. o Can present unique interagency metrics "How many papers referenced datasets from a specific satellite?" o Direct 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 M-2 (Magenta Book) Issue 2, June 2012 ISO 14721:2012

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) 16 The DOI ® SystemISO /182

ORCID – Identifiers for people 17 Open Researcher & Contributor ID “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.”

Structured Data Server 18  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 ”)  GETting N-triples returns triples for which the current URL is the subject.  Relationships between resources are described using RDF predicates.

Structured Data Server 19 Sample requests : GET groundwater-aquifers.json GET groundwater-aquifers.nt GET resources.nt Sample relationships : dc:isPartOf prov:wasDerivedFrom prov:wasAttributedTo

Structured Data Server 20

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