Ecosystem Approach Community of Practice: VRE planning

Virtual Research Environments (VREs) are web based working environments tailored to serve the needs of a specific eScience scenario.

The iMarine project is called to deploy and operate a number of VREs to satisfy the needs arising in selected scenarios identified by 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.. The plan governing this VREs operation activity is documented in a dedicated wiki page.

Such a plan mainly results from the needs and desiderata with respect to VREs that the Ecosystem Approach CoPCommunity of Practice. documented by this page.

VREs Specification Procedure

The specification of a VREVirtual Research Environment. mainly consists in a characterisation of the expected service in terms of data/datasets to be made available, facilities to be offered, and qualitative aspects to be guaranteed. In addition to that the service characterization should include the target scenario it is conceived for.

Such a characterisation is expected to be produced by the CoPCommunity of Practice., however it requires an assessment before being submitted to the project Consortium for the actual implementation of the service. This assessment consists of a review procedure having three phases:

1. iMarine Board Review: the members of this board are called to assess the technological and functional 'added value' that will be provided by any proposed VREVirtual Research Environment.. This review procedure applies to all types of VREVirtual Research Environment.'s, services and resources identified in the project that will be exposed to the CoPCommunity of Practice.;
2. PEB Review: the Project Executive Board is called to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed VREVirtual Research Environment. as well as to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the proposal;
3. Consortium Review: the project members involved in the implementation of the VREVirtual Research Environment. are called to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed VREVirtual Research Environment. implementation and to agree on a deployment schedule;

If all the three review phases are passed, the project agrees to implement the identified VREVirtual Research Environment. and start working on it.

VREVirtual Research Environment. Specification Template

The many opportunities provided by 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. operated through a gCube-based infrastructure at times may be overwhelming and difficult to grasp by representatives from e.g. the Communities of Practice behind the Business Cases.

In order to facilitate the collection of and negotiations on specific desiderata, a template that captures first the CoPCommunity of Practice. 'wishlist', and then discusses these with Board representatives, WP3 members, and PEB delegates.

A proposal for such template could be:

Product

Describe the expected service in maximum 3 sentences

Priority to CoPCommunity of Practice.

List proposed solution priority following the iMarine Board priority setting criteria:

• Potential target community;
• Users;
• Potential for co-funding;
• Structural allocation of resources;
• Referred in DoW;
• Business Cases;
• How does the proposed action generally support sustainability aspects;
• How consistent it is with EC regulations/strategies (eg INSPIRE);
• Re-usability – benefits – compatibility;

Parentage

Relation to CoPCommunity of Practice. Software

Relation to D4S technologies

Productivity

Are the proposed measures effective?

Does it reduce a known workload?

Presentation

How must the component be delivered to users? (UI Design / on-line help / training material / support)

Policy

Are there any policies available that describe data access and sharing?

Have the Copyright / attribution / metadata / legal aspects been addressed from a user and technology perspective?

Proposed VREs

Currently, a set of functional VREVirtual Research Environment.'s is in the CoPCommunity of Practice. disposal, but these will need various modifications before they will be adopted by new consortium members.

1. FCPPS The reporting tool;
2. ICIS The Timeseries management environment;
3. AquaMaps The species predictive modeling environment;
4. VTI The Vessel Transmitted Information management and modeling environment;

Already in an advanced state of progress, or planned extensions to the above are:

1. SPREAD Building on a subset of ICIS capabilities, SPREAD will add geospatial reallocation features ;
2. Codelistmanager The management of Codelists requires the further development of the facility in ICIS;
3. CodelistMapper The generation of persitent mappings between codes, code lists, and data using those codes requires that similar functionality developed in ICIS be made available as a separate VREVirtual Research Environment.;
4. VME DB The Vulnerable Marine Ecosystem database will contain VME Factsheets. These factsheets rely on services provided in FCPPS for document workflow and content management, and will be published using the FiMES schema. The project had another meetng with FAO representatives last Friday. The use cases and requirements are not completed.;
5. VME Mapper based on VTI/ AquaMaps modelling and aggregation functions; access to geospatial data related to VME's;

In addition, a range of new VREVirtual Research Environment.'s that answer to specific data manipulation needs has been identified to support other VREVirtual Research Environment.'s; they provide functionality that other VREs may need to increse their uptake, or that open new data sources to existing VREVirtual Research Environment.'s

1. SpeciesModeller The AquaMaps VREVirtual Research Environment. with added algorithms;
2. OBIS The functionality required by OBIS;
3. C-Species Support for all VREVirtual Research Environment.'s in need of Taxonomy data; a Species Finder, based on GBIF and other repositories, supporting DarwinCore;
4. C-Chart Interactive display and editing of OBIS and other occurence data;
5. C-Map Use semantic technologies to calculate distances between objects, and draw relationships between lists of objects. A first candidate application would be the FAO VRMF tool, the technical requirements analysis can start in June 2012. The first domain where the tool would be tested are species names;
6. C-Route Manage the data workflows; transform data from one format in another, set access right, share, and publish to iMarine and external repositories;
7. Semantic Annotator The FAO services to annotate a document. Existing FAO services that might be repurposed here are FLOD, the AgroTagger and VocWorkbench;
8. X-Search FORTH will have to work with NKUA and FAO to stabilize the requirements;
9. SmartFish FAO will have to provide a description
10. Top Ontology FORTH has produced a first sketch, which will have to be discussed in the semantic cluster.
11. KB Browser IRD will have to describe their expectations.
12. Environmental Explorer The Terradue data discoverer and data access component. The VREVirtual Research Environment. would allow to schedule the Explorer, set search and aggregation parameters, invoke e.g. interpolation and Kriging functions (WPS??) and publish results;
13. Environmental Processor Invoke an internal or external process on a geospatial product, such as an aggregation over space and time, sample an image, filter on a bandwidth, transform into another format, etc.;
14. FishFrame The support for the IRD / EU FishFrame format and COST model;
15. MixeR Support to read from / write to an integrated, parallelized, or external R instance.

Additionally, the CoPCommunity of Practice. offers a host of independant services that will require to interoeprate with the VREVirtual Research Environment.'s. Examples are OpenSDMX, COTRIX, and Spread.