Date and time
Thursday, 2 October 2008, 9:00 - 17:00
Description
In recent years the Australian Government has committed to invest over $500M for implementing technological infrastructure that can enhance our ability to generate, collect, share, analyse, store and retrieve information. This new funding is enabling the development of distributed informatics and computational communities in the water, solid earth, environment, bioinformatics, spatial and marine domains. Most are only in their establishment phase and SEE Grid lV seeks to bring these communities together to identify common goals, common priorities, areas of overlap, and seek opportunities to address common imperatives.
The workshop metaphor is that as new ‘houses’ of informatics are being built in NCRIS (e.g., AuScope, IMOS, Atlas of Living Australia) and elsewhere (water, spatial, national digital elevation framework), we need to ensure that they can ultimately be seamlessly connected within the ‘village’ that is Environmentally Sustainable Australia.
The objective of SEE Grid lV is to lay the foundation for these communities to be able to share data and information seamlessly and to ultimately be capable of participating in cross-disciplinary scientific workflows that will underpin the next generation of research into an Environmentally Sustainable Australia. Papers will be by invitation only. Program themes will include:
- Drivers for communities to share information across domain boundaries
- Planned developments on infrastructure for enabling cross domain research
- Presentations on new and planned major national initiatives in the Water, Marine, Earth Sciences, Spatial and Biology domains
- Comparison of information infrastructures and computational workflows
- Group discussions to identify common problems and brainstorm common solutions
- Developing a national strategy for addressing common imperatives across the domains
Papers from the 3 previous SEE Grid Conferences are available on https://www.seegrid.csiro.au/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome.
Outline
The following is a provisional program.
Session I: Setting the Scene
- Welcome and Introduction
- Keynote: The Global Survival Debate - driving an imperative for interoperable data and information communities
- Separating concerns to create a 'village' of interoperable communities to underpin research for an Environmentally Sustainable Australia
- Developing the Australian e-Research Infrastructure to enable cross disciplinary workflows: what are the key questions?
Session II: 'Houses' in the Australian Environmentally Sustainable Information 'Village': components, architecture and strategies for developing cross-disciplinary capabilities
- The Australian Water Resources Sector 'House'
- The NCRIS Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Network (TERN) 'House'
- The Australian Geospatial and Topographic sector 'House'
- The NCRIS Integrated Marine Observing Sytem (IMOS) 'House'
- The NCRIS Integrated Biological Systems and Atlas of Living Australia 'House'
- The NCRIS Structure and Evolution of the Australian Continent (AuScope? ) 'House'
- Introduction to the afternoon sessions
Session III: Discussion Groups
- Concurrrent breakout discussion groups on specific topics with a focus on identifying common goals, common priorities, areas of overlap, and opportunities to address common imperatives.
- Cross-disciplinary Discovery Tools (registers, registries, catalogues, data product specifications)
- Cross-domain Content Interoperability (information models, vocabularies, ontologies, and registers)
- Cross-domain Computational Workflows (generic patterns, tools, cross-disciplinary work benches)
Session IV: Summaries and Wrap Up
- Summaries from each Breakout Group: development of recommendations for addressing common imp[eratives for 'Building Interoperable information communities for an Environmentally Sustainable Australia'
- Wrap Up: Where NCRIS can help enable Interoperability for an Environmentally Sustainable Australia
SEE Grid Background
The Solid Earth and Environment Grid Community (SEE Grid) is an established international Community of Practice. It brings together people in the earth, environmental and computing sciences to address the issues of transparent access to data and knowledge about the earth. The aim is to enhance our ability to explore for and sustainably manage our natural and mineral resources. The community was an outcome from the SEE Grid I Conference in 2003 and now includes representatives from organisations devoted to open standards and data exchange including State and Commonwealth agencies, Academia and international organisations.
The three previous SEE Grid conferences were focussed on development of standards and supporting infrastructure for spatial information exchange and the presentation of exemplars of information services, computational modelling and simulation papers can be found on the home page.
The SEE Grid community web site has an excess of 350 registered subscribers. In 2007 it had had 50,000 unique visitors and continues to grow in 2008 with over 5,000 unique visitors per month. Registered users span academic, government and industry organisations and business interests ranging across data custodians, software vendors, HPC researchers, and end users from many difference domains in the earth and environmental sciences.