Partnerships and Networks

The US Environmental Protection Agency, the European Environment Agency, the US Geological Survey’s Biological Resources Discipline, the National Biological Information Infrastructure, the UN Environment Programme, the European Union’s Joint Research Center, and other organizations are joining together to advance Ecoinformatics – the application of information science and information technology to the environment to provide people with information to take responsible actions that result in protection of the environment and health.
The goal is to support the individual missions of the organizations -- at local to global levels--through stimulation of information science and information technology advances that:

Enable individuals in every endeavor to make well informed decisions--the best choices--when taking actions that have an environmental impact. For example, choices of policies, processes and materials to utilize
Provide decision makers with knowledge products and arrays of information that show the best measures of success for environmental programs;
Integrate environment, biodiversity, health and other related information to create opportunities for predictive knowledge, analysis and prevention;
Improve the quality of information available to the public and research communities;
Reduce the cost of creating and reporting environmental information; and
Improve the accessibility, sharing, comparability, and integration of existing data.

As part of this broader initiative, the Ecoinformatics Technology Working Group draws together many projects that are researching, developing, demonstrating, piloting and deploying environmental information technologies. This effort seeks to expand the benefits of these activities by deploying information systems internationally; sharing the costs and benefits of the development; and publicizing the results.

Major projects include sharing experiences and results; fostering an ecoinformatics marketplace; cooperating on emerging technologies, and developing key elements for interoperability including data standards and terminologies.

Areas of technology investigation include:

Data standards development – this area provides the integration of meaning and definitions across heterogeneous data systems allowing those that use the data to understand the similarities and differences among terms and data system fields. This includes an investigation of environmental terminologies through a subgroup activity known as EcoTERM.

Semantics and metadata management – this area is increasingly important as new advanced computer science and search techniques based on semantic web technologies make accessing heterogeneous data system holdings more feasible with less need for wholesale redesign of distributed data systems. Advancements rely on International Organization for Standardization (ISO), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other voluntary standards development activities. A specific activity involves the development of metadata registries that describe data elements, definitions, technical attributes of data, etc.

Messaging and data exchange protocols – this area starts with the international and business commerce developed protocols, particularly development and use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) designs, formats and structures for environmental and health data exchange. Aspects of this include geo-location of data for better understanding and utility as well as conveying descriptive metadata that documents the meaning of data.

Advanced networking technologies – this area includes an investigation of technologies such as computer grids that will allow the transfer of massive amounts of data and the use of tools and technologies in a virtual environment, resulting in more collaborative workspaces.

Knowledge management – this is where the techniques and agreements reached in the other aspects of Ecoinformatics come together to create environmental and health indicators. Indicators represent one way to express and explore the knowledge to be used by policy makers, researchers, environmental decision makers in the field, and the public to assess environmental conditions, to design or participate in effective and efficient interventions and finally, to measure their success.