| NSF Org: |
RISE Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 18, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 15, 2019 |
| Award Number: | 1541008 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Eva Zanzerkia
RISE Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER) GEO Directorate for Geosciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $677,919.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $709,588.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2019 = $31,669.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
266 WOODS HOLE RD WOODS HOLE MA US 02543-1535 (508)289-3542 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
98 Water Street Woods Hole MA US 02543-1026 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | EarthCube |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001920DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.050 |
ABSTRACT
Across-domains, agencies and political boundaries, our environment is being continuously observed and studied. The researchers in this project are looking for short-term, near-term and long-term changes while researching new and evolving methods to observe properties and to process the collected observations. Emerging technologies enable us to provide and discover the data openly and freely. But, if we do not understand the newly discovered data, with its inherent limitations and biases, it cannot be responsibly utilized for new or collaborative research efforts. Working with environmental sensor manufacturers and researchers, the X-DOMES project will develop tools and social and technical infrastructure to facilitate the creation of data about data (metadata). Metadata describes not only who, when and where the observations were made, but also it must document how an observation came to be (provenance). By taking this knowledge out of manuals and human-readable documents, the X-DOMES model creates metadata that can be treated like data ? discoverable and searchable, making it ready to be incorporated into automated archival and processing for quality assurance and validation methods.
Leveraging existing relationships with large NSF-funded data management programs, EarthCube building blocks and working groups, and environmental sensor manufacturers and consortia, we will establish a community of sensor manufacturers and other stakeholders to provide a unifying approach to describing sensors and observations across geo-science domains. Built on an existing sensor metadata model that references registered, standards-based vocabularies, the X-DOMES pilot project will provide a suite of tools, built upon community-adopted standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to demonstrate and facilitate the generation of documents that are discoverable and accessible on-line and/or directly from onboard sensor descriptions. The project will also demonstrate mechanisms to associate the data with the metadata through standards-based web services. With vendor-ready tools implemented throughout a broad-based community, the X-DOMES Network will lay the foundation for the development of and adoption of interoperable access to much needed content-rich sensor metadata.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
We envision the evolution of an interdisciplinary infrastructure that supplements observational data assets with sufficient knowledge about how it was created. The metadata descriptions are to be machine-actionable, standards-based and created to provide sufficient content to enable assessment of the data in terms of its use and reuse.
The X-DOMES pilot project has developed tools needed in realizing these goals and has informed a community of beneficiaries who can affect adoption and implementation of these capabilities. These tools are based upon community-adopted standards that enable semantic and syntactic interoperability, facilitating cross-disciplinary adoption and alignment.
We provide an infrastructure to easily register terms, providing W3C Semantic Web interoperability. The X-DOMES Ontology Registry/Repository (ORR) software and the ESIP Community Ontology Registry/Repository (COR) are available for communities to easily register terms about sensors and processes, using spreadsheets. Registering terms provides the ability to reference “meaning” via link(s) and to create interdisciplinary alignment of the “meaning” using community-adopted ontologies. It enables information providers to be specific about terms while allowing others to discover and align the knowledge.
X-DOMES also developed SensorML editors to create, view and edit SensorML documents. The use of the editors promotes machine-actionable, consistent content. The terms introduced in the SensorML can reference ORR registered terms, thus providing semantic capabilities with the syntactic interoperability provided by SensorML (OGC community-adopted process model). The SensorML model describes processes, using terms like input, output, capabilities, characteristics, providing machine-actionable content to harvest sensor and process information (operational range, precision, accuracy). This content can be used in data assessment and also in automated data quality processing algorithms.
Once a SensorML document has been created, it can be deposited in the X-DOMES Sensor Registry/Repository (SRR) to provide a uniquely identified, persistent identifier of the sensor and/or sensor model. An instance of a sensor can reference a sensor model as a “typeOf” that model, and inherit the properties of the sensor model. The registration of the SensorML in the SRR creates a link to the content, with version control and ownership information. This identifier can be associated to the data or to publications relating to the data, processing or sensor.
INTELLECTUAL MERIT
By capturing the information (metadata) at each stage of its generation, a more complete and accurate description of data provenance can be communicated. By documenting the information in machine-harvestable, standards-based encodings, metadata can be shared across disciplinary and geopolitical boundaries. Using standards-based frameworks enables automated harvesting and translation to other community-adopted standards, which facilitates the use of shared tools and workflows, with persistence of knowledge. Through the use of community-adopted standards, the X-DOMES pilot project facilitates all these advances, as well as automated management of program resources.
By providing common content in standards-based encodings, data managers and researchers will have access to shared resources that are discoverable and readily available, with associated data and metadata, thus reducing the time required to archive, re-use or integrate data. The environmental sensing community will be able to leverage common tools developed to create and utilize these standards. The establishment of a cross-domain network of stakeholders (sensor manufacturers, data providers, domain experts, data centers) is needed to provide a unifying voice for the specification of content and implementation of standards, as well as a central repository for sensor profiles, vocabularies, guidance and product vetting. The ability to easily share fully described observational data not only provides a better understanding of data provenance and it also enables the development of common data processing and assessment workflows, fostering a greater trust in our shared global resources. The X-DOMES capabilities form the foundation for interoperable architectures designed to integrate and document observational data.
BROADER IMPACTS
The project outcomes will
- Help large observational data producers automate and manage sensor and operational provenance
- Encourage small federally funded data providers to describe sensor data in ways that meet agency requirements for data management
- Facilitate common content and standards-based production of interoperable sensor documentation by environmental sensor manufacturers
- Enable data aggregation centers to build relationships across domains for integration of sensor-based observations
- Provide the ability to assess data quality and automate quality control, based upon manufacturers’ descriptions of sensor provenance
- Generate registries for sensor and deployment metadata that can be utilized by building blocks of a layered architectural cyberinfrastructure
- Create open-source tools and libraries to discover, access, translate and associate sensor metadata
- Promote better documentation for data archival of federally funded assets
- Speed sensor network deployments, providing better, faster event response data
- Reduce data analysis effort and time for scientists and emergency managers
- Improve the reproducibility of research products by capturing relevant metadata at each stage of data generation
Last Modified: 10/08/2020
Modified by: Janet Fredericks
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