References Archive - Page 3 of 9 - 52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH

EMODnet Ingestion III

European Marine Observation and Data Network

Marine data ingestion and safekeeping in and for EMODnet

The European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) brings together more than 160 organizations to improve the harmonized sharing of marine data. As part of the larger EMODnet context, EMODnet Ingestion 3 continues the work of its predecessors on facilitating the data publication process. This in particular includes the EMODnet Data Ingestion Portal, which helps data managers publish their data following open data principles.

52°North’s role in EMODnet Ingestion focuses on Sensor Web technologies. Based on results from previous projects and currently ongoing international standardization efforts, we support the consortium in addressing challenges related to sharing near real-time observation data streams. This includes not only the development of best practices and guidance, but also the creation of dedicated demonstrators and show cases.

In 2023, 52°North worked with several partners to enable research vessels to share their near real-time tracking data using interoperability standards, such as MQTT and the OGC SensorThings API. We further refined the resulting data publication workflow, built on top of the Eurofleets Automatic Reporting System (EARS), and described it in related publications.

52°North’s focus in EMODnet Ingestion 3 is the use of the OGC SensorThings API to provide live event data from research vessels. Another major topic is the integration of OPeNDAP/ERDDAP services with SensorWeb infrastructures. This includes in particular the collaboration on the OGC API – Connected Systems in the respective OGC standards working group. 52°North will provide an implementation of this proposed standard, a successor to the OGC Sensor Observation Service and the OGC Sensor Planning Service, based on pygeoapi.

Partners

44 partners from all over Europe

52°North is a subcontractor of Maris B.V., The Netherlands

PlasticObs_plus

Developing a Geospatial Data Platform

Supporting machine learning on multisensor data from airborne remote sensing

The PlasticObs_plus research project (funding code: 67KI21014A) is part of the BMUV (Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection) funding initiative “AI lighthouse projects for the environment, climate, nature and resources”. It investigates machine learning on multi-sensor data from airborne remote sensing to combat plastic waste in oceans and rivers as part of the funding program “Kl-Lighthouses for Environmental Protection”. The project goal is to develop an integrated measurement system for routine, quasi-synoptic acquisition and visualization of the distribution of plastic debris on the ocean surface and on shorelines or coastal strips via remote sensing and artificial intelligence methods. In addition to the intended real-time data acquisition of plastic objects by airborne sensors, downstream data analysis plays a central role in the research project.

52°North’s role as subcontractor is to support the development of a platform for geodata management that will enable further processing of the raw data. This includes developing a central geo-portal, which will provide the results as a web map service. Ultimately, the platform will be accessible to the general public, stakeholders and responsible public agencies to promote sustainable solutions to environmental pollution and targeted, effective counter strategies.

In 2023, 52°North activities focused on gathering and analyzing requirements to derive a software architecture for managing the project’s research data. This resulted in an architectural design centered around a GeoNode-based data repository. Other components, such as dedicated data ingestion workflows and a visualization component, ensure that the needs of the researchers in the PlasticObs_plus project are met. Towards the end of 2023, the first steps were taken to install the necessary software ecosystem.

PlasticObs_Plus Architecture — PlasticObs+ Architecture Overview

Partners

OPTIMARE Systems GmbH, Germany

Jade Hochschule Wilhelmshaven/Oldenburg/Elsflet, Germany

everwave GmbH, Germany

Customer

Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, Germany

MINKE

Metrology for Integrated Marine Management and Knowledge Transfer Network

MINKE enables scientists to have a better understanding ofmeasurement data and to combine data of different quality levels.

The H2020 project MINKE integrates key European marine metrology research infrastructures to propose an innovative “oceanographic data quality” framework for European stakeholders monitoring and managing marine ecosystems. MINKE proposes a new vision for the design of marine monitoring networks. It considers accuracy and completeness as the driving components of quality in data acquisition. This new vision is framed in a helix model of innovation that incorporates all the elements involved in the monitoring network design:

Context (ocean health): identifying the Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) as the key parameters to monitor
Civil society (NGOs, maker communities, social media and Citizen Science platforms): key actors to ensure data integrity
Academia: researching new methods to ensure the accuracy and the global quality of the final products, developing tools to integrate information from high quality oceanographic instruments and low-cost instrumentation
Industry: improving the performance of the observations with new instrumentation, data transmission systems and cost-effective technologies
Governments: providing the legal and socio-economic framework for the development of the proposed network

52°North co-leads a dedicated work package on data harmonization. The core topics of this work package include the evaluation of interoperability standards, the investigation of integration options for the European Open Science Cloud, the handling of uncertainty information, as well as the connection to data aggregation platforms such as EMODNET.

In 2023, 52°North’s team focused on aspects related to data harmonization. In a dedicateddeliverable, 52°North developed best practices for publishing MINKE metadata and data sets in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) using platforms such as Zenodo and Seanoe.

MINKE Project — Overview of the MINKE Sensor Quality Information Publication Workflow

The team is also involved in the specification process of the OGC API – Connected Systems in the corresponding OGC Standards Working Group. In addition to a new iteration of the Sensor Web Enablement Common (SWECommon) and Sensor Model Language (SensorML), including JSON encodings for both, a new API is being developed that brings ideas from the OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS) and OGC Sensor Planning Service (SPS) into the OGC API family of standards. The team plans to evaluate this evolving standard with MINKE data and metadata and has initiated an implementation based on pygeoapi.

Partners

Coordinator: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Spain

Institut français de recherche pour l’exploitation de la mer (Ifremer), France

Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR), Greece

Consorcio para el diseño, construcción, equipamiento y explotación de la Plataforma Oceánica de Canarias (PLOCAN), Spain

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain

Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGC), Italy

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Italy

Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRiM), Italy

Service hydrographique et océanographique de la Marine (Shom), France

Norsk institutt for vannforskning (NIVA), Norway

National Oceanography Centre (NOC), United Kingdom

Agenzia nazionale per le nuove tecnologie, l’energia e lo sviluppo economico sostenibile (ENEA), Italy

Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Germany

Université d’Aix-Marseille, France

Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile

Anel.lides Sl, Spain

Laboratoire national de métrologie et d’essais (LNE), France

Institut d’Arquitectura Avançada de Catalunya (IAAC), Spain

Suomen ympäristökeskus (SYKE), Finland

Joint Programming Initiative Healthy and Productive Seas and Oceans (JPI Oceans), Belgium

European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water-column Observatory – European Research Infrastructure Consortium (EMSO ERIC), Italy

University of Manitoba

Managing Geospatial Research Data and Sensor Data Streams with GeoNode

Customization and extension of a GeoNode instance to support the management of research data and sensor data streams

The Centre for Earth Observation Science (CEOS) at the University of Manitoba operates a data repository that hosts and shares its research data based on the FAIR principles. In collaboration the University of Manitoba, 52°North has redeveloped a protion of this platform. A central element of the system is GeoNode, which handles the sharing of spatial data. In addition, the OGC SensorThings API standard is used to share real-time meteorological and water quality data. In the initial project phase, 52°North customized a first version of GeoNode. We also integrated a SensorThings API instance into GeoNode and coupled it with a custom dashboard application for visualizing time series data.

Our activities in 2023 were driven by the transition from a project to a service contract relationship between 52°North and the CEOS. 52°North performed various tasks to ensure the operation of GeoNode and the supporting services, such as locking down the STA instance by switching to public read, private write access. This resulted in contributions to the FROST server open source project. We also updated GeoNode to the latest 3.x version 3.3.3. This included updating the dashboard and all of its dependencies to the latest available versions. Due to the import of two stations by different configurations and software versions of a software called “data-transloader”, we also performed data management in the STA database, which included merging and harmonizing different time series. We then reviewed and merged several stations and time series inserted for virtually different stations. To avoid this problem in the future, 52°North contributed to the open source “data-transloader” of the GeoSensorWeb Lab at the University of Calgary. The University of Manitoba, with our support, transfered the project to the Canadian Consortium for Arctic Data Interoperability for future maintenance. 52°North has tightened up the subscription configuration to prevent future abuse. In addition, we removed spam content and accounts from the installation. We also identified and implemented requirements for additional metadata editing features for the STA datastream in the GeoNode extension and performed several maintenance tasks. These included GeoServer CVEs, Docker disk usage management, and identifying the limits of GeoNode remote service support.

Customer

University of Manitoba, Canada