1. 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
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Overview
Introductions
History
ELFIE
the Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment
SELFIE
the Second Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment
Review and Future directions
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3. 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
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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
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5. Demonstration – Soil profiles and descriptions
History - Soil Data IE
Demonstration – Soil profiles and descriptions
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6. 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
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7. 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’?
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8. ‘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
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9. ‘…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
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11. 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:
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)
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12. ELFIE - Applying OGC/W3C Best Practices
The engine … the ID and the link
‘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
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13. 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 (URIs)
Can be converted to RDF
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Demonstration
An overview of shiny ELFIE outcomes and linked environmental data is here:
My favourite demo uses the ELFIE search client.
ELFIE search client downloads available at these locations:
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ELFIE Resource
SELFIE Resource
(via OGC Feature API)
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16. 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...)
HTTP 303
HTTP 200
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17. SELFIE – Progress Non-information Resource Information Resource
Meta Resource
Data Resource
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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.
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19. 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)
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(EASY) QUESTIONS
Reports, examples and demos at Working repository at
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