ESIP Update: New Summer Meeting Attendance Justification Template, Telecons for the week + News from OGC, IDCC & SciDataCon

Good Morning – 

ESIP catalyzes collaborations and often we don't see the results for some time, if ever. It was great to hear that work funded through the 2016 FUNding Friday awards (Sam's poster) led to a recent publication by three ESIP Community (formerly Student) Fellow alums, Sam Silva, Lindsay Barieri and Andrea Thomer. You can read their article, “Observing vegetation phenology through social media” in PLoS One. 

ESIP recently formed a new cluster on Data Models, led by Ethan Davis at Unidata. The group will focus on supporting efforts to advance existing and developing data models for earth system science data. A wiki workspace is set up and you can join the list-serv here if you are interested in being informed about their first telecon and other activities. 

Finally, as we are now just at two months to the ESIP Summer Meeting, Christine White, ESIP President has drafted a meeting attendance justification template. We hope this is helpful and would welcome any feedback. 

Thanks & have a good week, 

Erin 
—– 
Erin Robinson
Executive Director, ESIP

---

Quick reminders: 

• Register for the 2018 Summer ESIP Meeting
• The Lab opened up the call for incubator projects. Details on submission are here. 

This Week's Collaboration Area Telecons: 

• Tuesday: Governance, CLEAN, Science Communication
• Wednesday: Science Software (tentative), Visioneers 
• Thursday: Data Analytics, Drones

See the full telecon calendar here. Select the meeting you'd like to attend, login instructions are included in description. 

Telecon Highlight: 
Visioneers met last week, where I debriefed on the site visit. Slides & Google Doc notes are here. We have scheduled another meeting for this Wednesday to dive in on drafting guidelines for session leaders. If you have input on how sessions run or ideas from other meetings that had productive sessions please join us or add notes to the Google Doc. 

---

Around the Federation News

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks comments on the draft charter of a proposed Earth Observation Exploitation Platform Domain Working Group (DWG).

Earth Observation (EO) data captured by satellites has always been ‘big’ but an ever-increasing number of satellites capturing data at higher spatial and spectral resolutions has meant that client access to EO data has required larger and larger downloads, and even in-house IT infrastructure just to manage the volume of data. Thus, the incentive to create cloud-based, web-accessible platforms in which to access and analyse EO data on-the-fly has also grown in recent years.

This incentive has meant that cloud-based EO ‘Exploitation Platforms’ have been independently developed by many public organizations and commercial companies. However, their independent development has also hampered interoperability between these platforms. The next step in this data exploitation revolution, then, is to link the platforms together to create an ecosystem in which each platform can contribute its offered services to the implementation of more complex use cases.

For example, a scientist assessing climate changes may need data across several providers – from vegetation indexes, to predictive rainfall models and more – in order to answer a research question. Standardized elements of EO Exploitation Platforms could provide a single interface for this climate scientist where each ‘cloud’ talks to each other in the background, sharing the data, applications, tools and services between the platforms to generate a final result for the scientist.

Indeed, the ESA EO Exploitation Platforms built to date all share a common set of functionalities ripe for standardization:

• Data provisioning;
• Information visualization and analysis;
• Data processing; and
• User Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting.

This Domain Working Group will bring together service and technology providers of Earth Observation Data Exploitation Platforms in order to define a standards-based framework for the platforms’ interfaces that addresses and unifies the platforms through this common set of functionalities.

The Earth Observation Exploitation Platform DWG draft charter is available for review and comment from the OGC Portal. Comments are due by 30 May 2018 and should be submitted via the method outlined at www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/168.

See the OGC’s Domain Working Group and Standards Working Group pages to learn about other standards activities that are ongoing in the OGC. There is currently strong emphasis on topics related to Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Aviation & Unmanned Systems (eg UAVs), Big Data, Linked Data, Disaster Response, Maritime, and more.

International Data Week – Call for SciDataCon Papers closes May 31 (EXTENDED Deadline)
The deadline to submit abstracts for papers and poster for SciDataCon 2018, part of International Data Week, 4-8 November, Gaborone, Botswana is 31 May. Following some necessary improvements to the conference management system the Programme Committee has decided to extend the deadline for abstracts to 31 May.

Submit Abstracts for Papers and Posters: https://www.scidatacon.org/IDW2018/submit/
Call for Papers and Posters: https://www.scidatacon.org/conference/IDW2018/call_for_papers/
Provisionally Accepted Sessions: https://www.scidatacon.org/IDW2018/sessions/

Themes and Scope of SciDataCon: https://www.scidatacon.org/conference/IDW2018/conference_themes_and_scope/

Submissions for IDCC19 in Melbourne now open!
*Collaborations and Partnerships: addressing the big digital challenges together* 14th International Digital Curation Conference, 4-7 February 2019, Melbourne, Australia*

We're delighted to announce that submissions for IDCC19 are now open! You will already have seen announcements about the theme for the conference and an indication that we were reworking submission formats. This is now complete and we're ready to receive your papers via conftool.

The central focus of IDCC19 is to examine collaborations and partnerships in the field of digital curation and preservation. Submissions should address one of the topics below:

• Grand curation challenges
• Building diverse and inclusive communities
• Examples and models
• Good foundations for working together

For full call information and details of how to submit, please go to 
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc19/submissions

As well as the usual poster, demo and workshop submissions, we are introducing lightning talks and have merged the research and practice paper strands.

Proposers of lightning talks are invited to submit a one-page abstract (approximately 500 words) to give a 10 minute talk at the conference. Paper proposers are required to submit a 5-page extended abstract. If your abstract is accepted, you will be invited to give a 20-minute presentation at IDCC and will be entered into an award for the best paper. You are also invited to write-up your paper in full for publication in IJDC, either as a peer-reviewed or general article. Please follow the link below to get full details of the submission process.

Paper submissions and lightning talks close on 18th June 2018.
Demos and workshop submissions close on 31st July 2018
Poster submissions close on 30th September 2018