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2019 E2SIP Workshop Summary
The 2019 E2SIP Workshop was held May 9, 2019 in conjunction with the Collaborative Conference on Computational and Data Intensive Science 2019 (C3DIS 2019) conference in Canberra, Australia. It brought together over 60 participants across economic sectors and domains around common Earth science data challenges. The meeting had three goals:
- Knowledge exchange within the Australian Earth and Environment Science Information community;
- Knowledge exchange between the Australian community and the US community represented by ESIP; and
- Maintaining the community with regular forums.
The plenary included opening remarks by Dr. Lesley Wyborn on how the variety of disciplines and data streams can actually play together like an orchestra. New to this meeting was the inclusion of the Department of Environment and Energy, with remarks given by Beth Brunoro, DoEE’s First Assistant Secretary. Beth promoted machine readable open data and emphasized the need to use existing resources and not reinvent where appropriate. The plenary session concluded with a variety of lightning talks from Australian government and National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) facilities to lay the foundation for where partnerships currently exist.
The organizing team developed 6 breakout sessions which combined U.S. and Australian participation to focus on moving a variety of topics forward, including:
- Vocabulary Content Standardization
- Perspectives on Data Quality
- Accessing data at scale
- Metadata Interoperability
- Infrastructure required for FAIR Data
- Spatial Data Services
The workshop concluded with presentations on the existing efforts of the National Earth and Environmental Science Facilities Forum (NEESFF), Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) and ESIP.
What's Next? There is interest in continuing to arrange similar E2SIP/ESIP knowledge exchange events colocated with conferences such as GEO, C3DIS, and eResearch. The group is happy with the current fairly informal arrangement with ESIP and local coordination through NEESFF and the ARDC.
Related Upcoming Events:
- ESIP U.S. meeting (Tacoma, July 2019 – https://2019esipsummermeeting.sched.com).
- E2SIP BoF (Canberra collocated with the GEO-Week and Ministerial Summit, November 2019 – https://www.earthobservations.org/geoweek19.php).
Immediately following the workshop, an MOU that had been in preparation was signed by both ESIP and ARDC. ARDC will host a webinar with ESIP Disaster Lifecycle Cluster co-chair, Dave Jones on the Operational Readiness Levels defined by this cluster on July 10th, 2019. ARDC has also proposed developing a data quality decision tree that will help new people navigate the resources that the quality cluster has. ARDC also plans close collaboration with ESIP's Semantic Technologies Committee. The Spatial Data Services session is considering starting an ongoing ESIP cluster on this topic. Data from sUAS was tabled at this workshop, but is another area of ongoing partnership between Australia and the U.S.
All materials from the 2019 E2SIP Workshop can be found here.
See what E2SIP participants are saying:
“It is great to see the E2SIP/ESIP finally growing. Over the last decade or so, I have been seeing so much in the US that Australian teams can leverage and vice versa, but it has been so hard to make each continent aware of what is available elsewhere. We no longer (or at least I don’t) have the gift of time: let's use E2SIP/ESIP to get this data stuff sorted out properly so that we can do more and better science on all these emerging FAIR data assets.” -Lesley Wyborn
“The international context of E2SIP really provides new and unique perspectives distinct from what you get domestically. I came away from E2SIP with new ideas and connections that I continue to use and benefit from. It's rewarding to be part of ESIP's broadening international connections that I know will be beneficial to both the existing ESIP community and the larger audience it engages. “ -Doug Fils
“It is exciting to see the two way exchange between the U.S. and Australian community take hold and take off beyond the organizing committee. We are also very grateful to partner with ARDC to build on shared interest around data management training.” -Erin Robinson
More about E2SIP: The Australian Earth and Environment Science Information Partners (E2SIP) was established through liaison with ESIP at the 2018 C3DIS Conference. ESIP is providing the governance structure to incubate E2SIP as a cluster and we have added an E2SIP representative to the ESIP Board, and several Australian organizations have joined ESIP as organizational partners. Moving forward, E2SIP intends to support similar functions in Australia by bridging across organizations including CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, Department of the Environment, Geoscience Australia, AuScope, NCI, ARDC, IMOS, TERN, and ALA. E2SIP is working with the National Earth and Environmental Facilities Forum, which provides a common voice to government on behalf of long term science research infrastructure.
