Ecosystem Approach Community of Practice: smartfish

The SMARTFISH project offers an opportunity for participating countries of Indian Ocean and related RECs, RFBs and NGOs to receive support from FAO for the implementation of a Regional Fishery Strategy for the ESA-IO Region The project assists participating countries to strengthen national and regional fishery/aquaculture policy and strategy frameworks and to acquire additional knowledge on fisheries management for use in planning and monitoring. The project is funded by the EC and support participating countries to fulfill international commitment towards responsible fisheries and to improve food security. In this context, the 4th session of the SWIOFC Scientific Committee (Mahé, Seychelles, 29 November–2 December 2010) requested FIRMS, WIOFish, Statbase and Fishcode-STF to work on systems’ integration in order to lay the foundations of a comprehensive fisheries regional information system (F-RIS). This activity is part of the overall SmartFish project work plan.
The 3 existing information systems provide information and statistics on South West Indian Ocean fisheries:

• WIOFish, a regional knowledge database on fisheries;
• FIRMS, the Fisheries and Resources Monitoring System which globally integrates regional knowledge on the state of resources, including SWIO resources;
• and StatBase, a fisheries statistical database.

The main ojbective of the f-RIS is to develop a fisheries regional information system centralizing the SWIO information and statistics currently scattered among three distinct existing systems. The initial assessment phase highlighted the need to offer innovative technical to avoid developing a system based on a typical central database architecture with ad-hoc exchanges mechanisms.
The iMarine FLOD components were identified as potential core F-RIS engine to index and annotate information and data available in the 3 source systems and proposing the F-RIS portal browsing and query tools to access easily these information and data.

Collaboration with iMarine was initially focusing on web semantic services implementation and later was enriched with the need to host the portal as the initial hosting solution in the Kenyan Fisheries Marine Research Institute in Mombasa, Kenya was subject to sustainability issues.

The possibility to create a VREVirtual Research Environment. to host and make available to the community F-RIS index and annotations has been discussed and could be added to the SmartFish - iMarine collaboration in the next phase of SmartFish if it is validated.

Product

(Describe the expected service in maximum 3 sentences) iMarine is providing on one side hosting solution for the SmartFish portal. 2 versions of the prototypes are currently on-line, a first version

Implementation activity

The implementation can be tracked through TRAC:

• The initial request was described here [[1]]
• Main enhancements to the delivered facility are described by e.g.:
  • Data exchange [[2]]
  • Quick Search to update an existing VME description;
  • Stateless 'reports'
  • Fact-sheets can contain 'dynamic' sections with e.g. a overview of latest encounters / statistics;
  • Confidential sections (not all fact-sheets are public);
  • Evolving fact-sheets (Some changes over time have to be kept; compare this to e.g. the EU-membership that evolve over time);
  • Tablet or other media support.

Priority to CoPCommunity of Practice.

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

• The target community can be split in 2: data contributors and data consumers.
  • data contributors are scientists, policy makers, industry,
  • data consumers are and the wider public with an expressed interst in ;
• Users; data entry will be done by any registered scientist, policy support officer, biologist, industry representatives. With such a large and diverse user group, requirements to clearly separate content and ensure confidentiality requiremstn are obvious.
• Potential for co-funding; High
• Structural allocation of resources; The VREVirtual Research Environment. is expected to be prototyped towards the end of 2013. The GeoExplorer development has started, and the deliverables can be aligned with the release of VREVirtual Research Environment. components.
• Referred in DoW;in BC2
• How does the proposed action generally support sustainability aspects;
• How consistent it is with regulations/strategies ?.
• Re-usability – benefits – compatibility;

Parentage

Relation to CoPCommunity of Practice. Software

• FAO VME-DB
• FAO Webservices for reference data and code lists
• FAO Master Data Management
• FiGIS schema, fact sheet engine and website

Relation to D4S technologies

• D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. Reporting tool is the base for VME-DB VREVirtual Research Environment.
• D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. Work-flow tool will marshal the editing work-flow
• D4ScienceAn e-Infrastructure operated by the D4Science.org initiative. Web-services will update reports in the FAO database

Productivity

Are the proposed measures effective?

• Yes, as it enables a controlled multi-groups and multi-user editing network.

Does it reduce a known workload?

• When completed the VME-VREVirtual Research Environment.

Presentation

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

• The interactive Map User interface is expected to be able to describe / edit the properties (attributes) of a polygon or point.
• Collecting these features, defined through their featuretype, is expected to be done either through a VREVirtual Research Environment. or a connected stand-alone GIS Application. The feature type (the schema) can e.g. be defined in a VREVirtual Research Environment. for re-use in a desk-top GIS.
• The geoExplorer should be enriched with a style editor, and style settings should be persisted for a next login.

Policy

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

• data access and sharing policy of geospatial and OGC data [3]

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

For Yann / Aureliano.