Ecosystem Approach Community of Practice Overview

This page is dedicated to document the activities of the Ecosystem Approach Community of PracticeA term coined to capture an "activity system" that includes individuals who are united in action and in the meaning that "action" has for them and for the larger collective. The communities of practice are "virtual", ''i.e.'', they are not formal structures, such as departments or project teams. Instead, these communities exist in the minds of their members, are glued together by the connections they have with each other, as well as by their specific shared problems or areas of interest. The generation of knowledge in communities of practice occurs when people participate in problem solving and share the knowledge necessary to solve the problems. (EA-CoPCommunity of Practice.).

It will contain:

• the VRE planning page;
• the iMarine Business Cases page;
• the EA-COP Cluster collaboration page;
• the EA-CoP Milestones page;
• the EA-CoP Data Access and Sharing Policies page;
• the EA-CoP Discussion page;

The Virtual Research EnvironmentA ''system'' with the following distinguishing features: ''(i)'' it is a Web-based working environment; ''(ii)'' it is tailored to serve the needs of a Community of Practice; ''(iii)'' it is expected to provide a community of practice with the whole array of commodities needed to accomplish the community’s goal(s); ''(iv)'' it is open and flexible with respect to the overall service offering and lifetime; and ''(v)'' it promotes fine-grained controlled sharing of both intermediate and final research results by guaranteeing ownership, provenance, and attribution. (VREVirtual Research Environment.) planning page describes the EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. desiderata in terms of a composition of services and resources, delivered as a packaged single unit to the CoPCommunity of Practice.. A VREVirtual Research Environment. provides a defined set of services for a specific group of users that collaborate on a specified task or workflow. An alternative approach to VREs are gCube apps. In the context of the CoPCommunity of Practice. desiderata, no difference is made.

The power of a large infrastructure is evidenced by the quick mobilization of resources to be chained in a workflow. A set of VREVirtual Research Environment.'s or other resources could be composed where the output of one becomes the input of the next. One such example is SPREAD where based on Timesseries objects and Geospatial intersections, both provided through a VREVirtual Research Environment., a re-allocation must be made based on a range of assumptions. Such a group of interactive VREVirtual Research Environment.'s may also be in need of external data that can be quite dynamic, and rely on interoperable infrastructures.

The iMarine Business Cases combine technical requirements with organizational, political and managerial issues; they specify larger organizational concepts that may be supported by one or more VREVirtual Research Environment.'s. The page on business cases describes these from the technology perspective. After all, this is the technical wiki. Other information on organization and operation in support of the Business Cases can be found in the iMarine Board Channel.

The cluster collaboration describes how the CoPCommunity of Practice. organizes the requirements collection and discussion on high-level topics in a set of organic, but also technological clusters; geospatial, biodiversity, statistics, and semantic technologies all are supported by technologies that overlap in functionality with other clusters, yet are still easily identifiable as falling within one of the clusters.

The Milestone page here will organize content that relates to the realization of EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. Milestones, and that does not specifically belong to the cluster or requirements sections.

The EA-CoPCommunity of Practice. Discussion page will contain different sections on internal meetings, links to documentation, links to relevant iMarine Board Channel sections etc.