News - All
- Working group pages and updates (More Information)
- Regular news updates (More Information)
- Upcoming events (More Information)
The group supported the International Integrated Environmental Modelling (IEM) meeting at USGS Reston, Virginia USA in December 2010 which has led to the development of an IEM roadmap. Once published (imminent), UK / European implementation of this roadmap will be coordinated through the working group, highlighting the UK’s global leadership of the process.
The Working Group will be supporting a meeting in Autumn 2011 (details TBC) to identify commonalities between different UK projects working on Integrated Environmental Modelling. The financial services sector are becoming increasingly interested in the opportunities that linking environmental models will provide in assisting the financial quantification of risks from natural hazards.
The group has held an initial meeting at the offices of DEFRA highlighting the “science into policy” relevance to UK plc of the group. The meeting had scientific representations from every significant UK stakeholder, including every major soils research organisation and relevant data centres. The group is attempting to identify technological requirements for solving the long standing issues of data fragmentation and associated cultural / institutional divisions. An obvious early issue identified is the complex and conflicting semantics for describing soils from disparate end-user communities. Advice is being sought from the Semantics / Ontologies WG in resolving such issues.
A copy of the report into the group’s findings will be made available shortly.
The group has been slow to start due to the more abstract nature of the problems to be resolved. However, progress is now being made based on requirements originating from the model fusion and soils groups. The main focus of this group is expected to be the implications of; cloud computing, parallel computing and semantics in the cloud; for environmental data (large time series datasets), in particular integrating diverse and separated datasets for input into process models.
The group will start in earnest shortly with key contacts being contacted soon.
The group has a wide-ranging membership from across NERC institutes, academics working in environmental informatics, environmental protection agencies and industry. The team are seeking to define the role of semantics in each of these sectors, the technology used to manipulate semantics. The working group will be developing potential use-cases of semantic interoperability and how technology and expertise can be shared between these disparate sectors.
Jonathan’s background is as a geoscience IT project manager/developer who for many years managed for BGS the UK DEAL portal for offshore hydrocarbons data and work for BGS science projects.
Questions, suggestions or comments regarding the contents of this site should be directed to Jonathan Lowndes.