INTEROP: A Community-driven scientific observations network to achieve interoperability of environmental and ecological data

• Mark P. Schildhauer

Abstract
Advances in environmental science increasingly depend on information from multiple disciplines to tackle broader and more complex questions about the natural world. Such advances, however, are hindered by data heterogeneity, which impedes the ability of researchers to discover, interpret, and integrate relevant data that have been collected by others. A number of earth science disciplines, however, are recognizing the interoperability benefits of describing data at the level of observation and measurement, rather than at the level of the data set. The investigators propose the Scientific Observations Network (SONet) to initiate a multi-disciplinary, community-driven effort to define and develop the necessary specifications and technologies to facilitate semantic interpretation and integration of observational data across earth science domains. The technological approaches will derive from recent advances in knowledge representation that have demonstrated great utility in enhancing scientific communication and data interoperability within the genomics community. This effort will constitute a community of experts consisting of environmental science researchers, computer scientists, and information managers, to develop open-source, standards-based approaches to the semantic modeling of observational data. Working groups of experts will also engage in extending this core data model to include a broad range of specific measurements collected by the representative set of disciplines, and a series of demonstration projects will illustrate the capabilities of the approaches to confederate data for reuse in broader and unanticipated contexts.