24.04.2012 WP3 VRE List

FAO Meeting to plan VREVirtual Research Environment.'s and Applications

Marc Taconet's Office, Anton Ellenbroek, Erik van Ingen, Claudio Baldassarre, Emmanuel Blondel

Summary WP3 will continue to use the output of the iMarine Board meeting and cluster discussions to define and prioritize the list of tools and applications (including VREVirtual Research Environment.'s) it expects to see at the end of the project.

The template to describe VREVirtual Research Environment.'s can be found here: http://wiki.i-marine.eu/index.php/Ecosystem_Approach_Community_of_Practice:_VRE_planning

Staff were asked to comment on the proposal, and A.Ellenbroek mentioned that several initiatives have not been described at all, or only very briefly. Staff will assist in providing additional information, and FAO will oversse the production of the descriptions in the Statistical and Semantic clusters.

Additional calls are scheduled with Biodiversity and Geospatial cluster.

Several proposed VREVirtual Research Environment.'s are overlapping with others, and the issue of generalization vs. specialization came up; where to draw a line between VREVirtual Research Environment.'s, or how to share a limited set of functionality across similar application requirements. Case: Drawing a map in ICIS; we do not want that any user can access all statitical data, but how to prevent that? By defining 2 VREVirtual Research Environment.'s, or ask for data access rights attached to published TS? How to display a TS-in-a-FiMES report? etc.

In addition, a larger initiative emerged that, similar to OpenSDMX, will involve partners beyond the project, and channel effort from the wider CoPCommunity of Practice. to develop a Community CodeList Manager. This can be develoepd either from scratch, or start with the FAO VocBench project.