Mr. Peter N. Churchill
European Commission
Chair, WGISS
The CEOS Working Group on Information Systems and Services (WGISS) held its tenth meeting in Canberra from 10 to 12 May, kindly hosted by CSIRO of Australia.
Prior to the meeting CSIRO organised a Workshop concerning Global Spatial
Data Infrastructures (GSDI). Representatives of a wide range of regional
and national SDI’s attended the Workshop and reviewed global and regional
initiatives with a particular emphasis on data access and integration.
The conclusions of the Workshop were very positive, with both SDI and WGISS
representatives agreeing that the SDI’s are addressing a range of technical
issues relevant to WGISS. These included technical areas such as resource
discovery, resource evaluation and resource access and data formats where
technical collaboration could be foreseen in the development of tools,
techniques and recommendations. It also included potential joint demonstrations
of technical work. At the conclusion of the Workshop it was agreed
that these areas of collaboration would be pursued, with appropriate
mechanisms to allow such collaboration identified.
The WGISS meeting itself focussed on number of issues, but one key issue
dominated the proceedings: how to develop and improve the availability
of the rich suite of information systems and services (ISS) tools, techniques
and recommendations developed and held by WGISS and its members and associates.
This discussion took place in the wider ISS context. CEOS agencies are
continually developing and
implementing data and information systems to support that space systems.
In addition initiatives such as the IGOS-Partnership are now evaluating
the requirements for ISS. In the wider spatial information world there
are numbers of initiatives currently underway to ensure
the development of ISS tools, techniques and recommendations.
The solution was stimulated by consideration of the USA / Japan initiative,
the Global Observation Information Network (GOIN). GOIN’s objective is
to exchange global environmental data via information networks within and
between the USA and Japan. It has achieved this by having scientists and
ISS technicians working together to come to optimum solutions. This model
was considered and developed
at the WGISS Sub-Group meeting in London in April 2000, hosted by BNSC,
when the Global Observation of Forest Cover (GOFC) project approached WGISS
for help in the field of ISS. It was then further developed at WGISS 10,
where the idea of a WGISS
Test Environment was born. The WGISS Test Environment will call upon
the conglommeration of WGISS tools and services held
and operated by CEOS WGISS members and associates. These will be made
available via an on-line WGISS Menu, which is basically an open
reference list of WGISS products and services. The WGISS Menu will
be linked on-line to the products and services held by the individual organisations.
Selected user projects will then work in partnership with WGISS to define
their data and information systems and services requirements. Using a WGISS
Test Facility the ISS requirements of individual projects will be made
into a coherent, open, modular
system by the Test Facility partners to address each selected project’s
needs. The system will then be tested against the project’s requirements,
and can become the project’s pre-operational data and information system.
At the same time using this approach WGISS
will be able to develop and improve its tools and products to better
serve users’ needs. This concept is summarised in the figure below.
The concept and implementation of the WGISS Test Environment will now
develop further. A first demonstration of the Test Environment will take
place at the WGISS Sub-Group meeting in Bangkok on the 11th - 15th September,
and again at WGISS 11 in Ispra on the 27th - 29th September. This will
be based around the GOFC project. The results of these demonstrations will
also form part of the WGISS
report to Plenary in Brazil.
