Catalogue:Applications

The iMarine infrastructure resembles an archipelago where applications emerge as islands of services, resting on a underlying infrastructure bedrock. The islands specialize in one or more functions, yet are not isolated 'atolls'. Every island is well connected to others, and island-hopping is strongly encouraged. Each island offers a standard set of features that can be extended by selecting services from several topical bundles.

The iMarine infrastructure currently offers 4 main application bundles that can be customized and / or enriched. Each application in the infrastructure is tightly integrated with the underlying gCube enabling software, and can access and re-purpose data from other iMarine applications.

FYI Examples of other offers

• Cloudera
• Virtuoso

Through the enabling environment of gCube, all users benefit from infrastructure services <link>,

The 4 key-applications that iMarine has delivered and continues to enrich are:

• BiolCube; focuses on the management and interpretation of biological and ecological data in the environment.
• StatiCube; a complete full life-cycle data framework, from observational data to aggregated data repositories enriched with validation and analytical tools.
• GeosCube; tightly connected to the BiolCube, the framework, based on OGC compliant tools and services manage the storage and interpretation of geospatial explicit information, including WPS processing.
• PoliCube; brings semantic technologies for publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful to end-users, enabling them to produce LOD, to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried.

The bundle approach, by itself an abstraction over a host of services, is expected to offer more 'flavors' in the near future. For instance a focused approach on organizing access to computing resources, or a support infrastructure for Mobile Apps are foreseen:

• IceCube; will offer access to infrastructure, cloud and grid based computing resources for dummies.
• AppsCube; will offer an integrated approach to mobile app development. The infrastructure organizes the content and data-exchange with mobile apps, Please note that the App itself is not developed with iMarine, rather it relies on the infrastructure to maintain and manage the data collected with and exposed through this App.

BiolCube

BiolCube is available as a suite that packs many useful features in one environment to have a complete work-space for biologists working with occurrence data and reviewing species names. It offers:

• Occurrence data finder; download public datasets from world class biodiversity repositories to your private environment. In order to prepare the data set for use in further analysis, iMarine also offers tools for sanitizing data, filtering and duplicate detection. Occurrence data can be diertly vizualized on maps using the geo-explorer.
• Species name finder; If you are not sure what name to use when dealing with data, then iMarine offers tools to download and verify taxonomic and vernacular names of marine species.
• Species name matcher; validate the names of species names in your data to ensure they comply with the standard of your choice. iMarine offer powerful matching and reconciliation services, already at use at FAO, to identify close matches the names in your datasets. The infrastructure makes several key reference datasets available for consultation and reconciliation. These include the FAO ASFIS species list, and WoRMS register of marine species. If you wish, you can add your own reference list.
• Biodiversity mapping tools. The first iMarine species distribution and biodiversity mapping tools enabled the production of the well-known AquaMaps. With iMarine, the generation became faster, more robust, and results are shared in a collaborative environment. In addition to AquaMaps, many other biodiversity analytical and predictive tools are available.
• Species fact-sheets generator. With scientist spread over the globe, generating consistent information sheets on marine species is no sinecure. That is why the FishFinderVRE was designed. It offers a complete templating and reporting work-flow operated by scientists, for scientists. The results, species fact-sheets, can be disseminated in a variety of formats.

BiolCube is an independent yet not isolated bundle of specialized services for biologist. Well embedded in the iMarine e-InfrastructureAn operational combination of digital technologies (hardware and software), resources (data and services), communications (protocols, access rights and networks), and the people and organizational structures needed to support research efforts and collaboration in the large., it provides access to auxiliary services that render BiolCube in a multi-purpose toolbox for biodiversity data. iMarine enables a near-seamless access to

StatiCube

Example 'competitor' GSIM

StatiCube offers a complete data suite that manages the entire data-cycle from collection to archiving. With iMarine technologies exiting new capabilities are added to the life-cycle management of espacially time-series data.

StatiCube relies on continued support and ongoing development of a bundle of service. This Staticube bundle has separate development lines. These are;

• Data collection;
• Code lists management;
• Data mining;
• Data Lifecycle;
• Data publication;

Data collection

• Through batch processes
• Through streaming
• Through on-line input of single records (with support of reference data and code-lists)

Data access

• list .....

Data management

• Validation / curation
• Aggregation
• Indicator extraction

Reference data management

• Cotrix
• Ensure the correct reference data are available to individual processes. E.g. a list of EU-countries only when referring to EU, A list of French ports only when a landing is in France
• CLMapping
• Indicator definition

Data validation

• Tools
• Work-flow

Data dissimentation

• Reports
• Registry
• Datasets

Data work-flow organization

• Organize the flow of data into the iMarine infrastructure, and
• Assign responsibilities for activating a next phase in a work-flow to another user or process.

These are explained in more depth on the specifications pages.

For more information on getting started with and using StatiCube, the iMarine website offers many resources. You can also register here to experience some of the components.

Examples of StatiCube implementations are

• ICIS; for the collection and
• Tuna Atlas;
• TimeSeries Environment;

PoliCube

The primary aim of PoliCube is to deliver information to policy makers from a variety of sources as an integrated view generated using a variety of approaches, including semantic technologies.

PoliCube offers flexible reporting, search and retrieval, aggregation and projection facilities. These are primarily offered as data-driven indicators and topical fact sheets. These facilities can only be effective if a modern toolset is available to enrich or annotate existing data with relevant information in the form of e.g. uri's. This

The use of an infrastructure enables to focus on the needs of policy makers, that need to rely on dynamic reports, extracted near-real time from data coming in from multiple directions, and with varying quality and accessiblity policies attached to these data flows.

IceCube

A key benefit of iMarine is the ease to set up scalable data processing solutions. A scalable solution may be needed because you have to manage any combination of a lot of users, a lot of data, a lot of processing, and a lot of new functionality. This requires expertise that is usually not found in one place. An infrastructure can offer more than one solution; offering a dedicated computing environment, parallelization, access to a grid or cloud environment, or outsourcing computations to external infrastructures are all options to consider. With iMarine expertise, you can ask for a technology solution, where several options can be discussed. the services available on demand can be separeated in several categories:

• Manage administrative scalability
  • Manage users
  • Manage virtual Organizations

• Manage Functionality

• Manage Load scalability

• Manage geographic scalability
  • Keep your data an processes together to reduce
  • Bring your computation to your data to reduce bandwith use

AppsCube

The quickly growing use of mobile apps for data collection and dissemination requires that content and reference data are managed from an integrated data perspective. With ever more versatile and demanding apps, data often cannot be kept in one central repository that fits all sizes. Very often, apps mash up data from e.g. geospatial and statistical data resources, or when collection data, rely on constantly updated refrence data, such as on names of species, vessel characteristics, or local reporting requiremetns.

To manage a multitude of data collection and dissemination apps, an infrastructure that offers ...

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