Global Change Information System


The US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) develops and curates the Global Change Information System (GCIS) to establish "data interfaces and interoperable repositories of climate and global change data which can be easily and efficiently accessed, integrated with other data sets, maintained and expanded over time." [1] The initial focus of GCIS is to support the United States Third National Climate Assessment (NCA3), which will publish reports incorporating integrated access to inter-linked resources in addition to enhancing the transparency and ability of decision-makers to understand the conclusions and use of the underlying data for their own purposes. [2][3]

Scope of Work

The scope of USGCRP's work includes analyzing alterations in climate, land use and land cover, natural resources including water, agriculture and biodiversity , atmospheric composition, chemical composition and ecological systems that may alter the Earth's capacity to sustain life. Global change research includes activities aimed at describing and understanding the interactive physical, chemical and biological processes that regulate the Earth system; the unique environment that the Earth provides for life; changes that are occurring in the Earth system; and the manner in which such systems, environments and changes are influenced by human actions.[1] Data and findings associated with global change research are of great concern to the public, governments, and academics, and are used in policy and decision-making. In the GCIS, information is represented in a structured format, using the GCIS data models and ontology to represent objects (such as publications, publication sections, tables, figures, images, data sets, sensors, instruments, platforms, organizations, people, scientific research and activities) as well as the relationships among those objects.

Provenance and Semantics

The literal meaning of provenance is the origin or source of an idea or being. In scientific works, the documenting of provenance includes linking a range of observations and model outputs, research activities, people, and organizations involved in the production of scientific findings with the supporting data sets and methods used to generate them. The GCIS has developed information models and ontology to represent the content structure of the NCA3 and its associated provenance information, and has been extending the models to incorporate more global change information. Records of objects and relationships within the GCIS are represented in a database for the Semantic Web, which can be queried using the SPARQL language. The GCIS assigns globally unique persistent identifiers in all of the entities, activities, and agents relevant to provenance. Each identifier is mapped to a uniform resource identifier (URI) in the GCIS namespace,[4] allowing use of those identifiers for the Semantic Web and other linked data systems. By categorizing, annotating, and linking provenance information, the GCIS becomes capable of answering provenance-tracking questions about global change research.[5][6]

GCIS Ontology

The GCIS Ontology promotes representation and documentation by incorporating the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s recommendation on provenance modeling (PROV) into the design. [7][8] The ontology uses the namespace prefix GTIS. A conceptual map of the GCIS Ontology version 1.2 is accessible on the Web. Now days the global Information System changing handling main role.

References

  1. 1 2 US Global Change Research Program, 2012. The National Global Change Research Plan 2012–2021: A Strategic Plan for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, 132 pp.
  2. ↑ About the Global Change Information System
  3. ↑ Ma, X., Fox, P., Tilmes, C., Jacobs, K., Waple, A., 2014. Capturing and presenting provenance of global change information. Nature Climate Change 4 (6), 409-413.
  4. ↑ "Global Change Information System - GCIS". data.globalchange.gov. Retrieved 2015-11-27.
  5. ↑ Tilmes, C., Fox, P., Ma, X., McGuinness, D., Privette, A.P., Smith, A., Waple, A., Zednik, S., Zheng, J., 2013. Provenance representation for the National Climate Assessment in the Global Change Information System. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 51 (11), 5160-5168.
  6. ↑ Ma, X., Zheng, J.G., Goldstein, J., Zednik, S., Fu, L., Duggan, B., Aulenbach, S., West, P., Tilmes, C., Fox, P., 2014. Ontology engineering in provenance enablement for the National Climate Assessment. Environmental Modelling & Software 61, 191-205.
  7. ↑ Groth, P., Moreau, L., (eds.) 2013. PROV-Overview: An Overview of the PROV Family of Documents
  8. ↑ "GCIS Ontology". data.globalchange.gov. Retrieved 2015-11-27.

 This article incorporates public domain material from the U.S. Global Change Research Program document "About the Global Change Information System".

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