INTEROP ECO-OP: Employing Cyber Infrastructure Data Technologies to Facilitate IEA for Climate Impacts in NE & CA LME's (#3 & #7)

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

Award: 0955649 PI: Peter Fox Project Title INTEROP. ECO-OP: Employing Cyber Infrastructure Data Technologies to Facilitate IEA for Climate Impacts in NE & CA LME's (#3 & #7) The purpose of this INTEROP proposal is to facilitate the deployment of an Integrated Ecosystem Approach (IEA) to management in the Northeast and California Current Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs). The direct result of the proposed activity will be application-level data and information enhanced communication for developing the consensus networks to define the specific components of interest to support the implementation of NOAA?s Driver-Pressure-State-Impact Response framework (DPSIR) decision framework and the cyberinfrastructure technologies to ensure data interoperability and reuse. This new capability will serve as the essential foundation for the formal synthesis and quantitative analysis of information on relevant natural and socio?economic factors in relation to specified ecosystem management goals which can be applied in other LMEs. The scope of the network includes key stakeholders in four areas: scientists and data providers, agencies, national communities of practice, and decision makers/ policy developers. The network will undertake major activities at the core team working level; technical sessions and focused workshops within each of the stakeholder areas as well as across and among the areas. Integrative activities, aligned with existing NSF-funded interoperability focused projects, community conferences and meetings will provide dissemination and broad engagement opportunities. Also key to the network activities is semantically rich use case development using expertise in semantic web methodologies, especially related to diverse vocabulary needs across the stakeholder areas. Explicit in this project is the very broad dissemination of results; the diverse major stakeholders include decision and policy makers both at the agency and government levels as well as agency scientists and managers. The developed semantics based on leveraging existing standard vocabularies is likely to have very broad interest and use and enable extended interoperability across many disciplines. The very nature of open (semantically-enabled) data frameworks is that they receive substantial unintended use with the potential to provide substantial infrastructure improvements for research and education. The potential benefits to society at large in terms of providing a routine and sustainable IEA that is linked to decisions and policy along with the feedbacks to the underlying monitoring and data collection cannot be under estimated. This project provides a pilot toward a robust and sustainable implementation for new national agendas such as those contained in the U.S. National Ocean Policy (July 2010).