Mr Erin Kenna1
1CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia
In-situ observations need context to be interpreted and used appropriately. Sometimes, in research, we have the perfect solution to collect, manage and annotate our field data but frequently we find ourselves using different systems and service providers for collecting, managing, and accessing data from sensors and instruments. Metadata may include field notes, maintenance records, deployment configurations, instruments, sensors, quality control and calibrations. This can present challenges where different services have different features and/or use different schemas. Different protocols and formats can also present an interoperability challenge for data access and processing.
We are experimenting with de-coupling the metadata records from the services hosting the observation data and using persistent identifiers and linked data to enable integration of these records with the datasets and observations hosted by multiple applications.
This gives us stability to develop our metadata frameworks (and related tools and systems) independently from the applications we use to collect and store the data and allows us to provide a linked data interface to discover datasets from different applications. This also gives us greater agility in migrating from one application to another if needs change. For example, requirements for different instruments, budget constraints, archiving observations to different systems, replicating records to another system to facilitate access.
We will discuss an implementation of this for HydraSpectra instruments and how this provides interfaces and outputs to users where the observations and metadata records are assimilated into views and workflows providing richer context for users and an abstraction of the service provider applications.
Biography:
Erin is a generalist who wears different hats to support research in varying capacities across multiple projects as a data manager, data engineer, data operations, spatial scientist, software engineer and generally facilitating the organisation of and access to data.