METADATA AND REMOTE SENSING: LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AND OPPORTUNITIES

Mathew Wyatt
Australian National Data Service
iVEC, The hub of advanced computing
26 Dick Perry Avenue, Kensington WA 6151
08 6436 8545
mat@ivec.org
Luke Edwards
eMII - Integrated Marine Observing System
iVEC, The hub of advanced computing
26 Dick Perry Avenue, Kensington WA 6151
08 6436 8958
luke@ivec.org
Mervyn Lynch
Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Curtin University
Kent Street, Bentley WA 6102
08 9266 7540
m.lynch@curtin.edu.au

Abstract
Data-driven research is on the rise, which creates a vast amount of opportunity
for innovation in science, but also introduces a number of problems with regard
to information access, maintainability and discovery. Governments in Australia
and worldwide are supporting a cultural and practical change to a world of open
data, transparent government, e-democracy and eResearch. There have been
several national reports (AAS/ATSE, 2009) that have reflected on aspects of
data and information management in the earth observations (EO) area and a
number of recommendations put forward on how to address some key issues to
ensure maximum public benefit from earth observation technology and the
information it delivers. There are opportunities for remote sensing professionals
to engage with some of the national initiatives occurring at the moment in
Australia, in the context of how remote sensing can fit into the national data
and information strategy for Australia and the international community.
Initiatives of relevance include ANDS (Australian National Data Service), IMOS
(Integrated Marine Observing System) and TERN (Terrestrial Ecosystem
Research Network). With these initiatives being in their infancy, there is an
opportunity as a remote sensing and scientific community, to influence
technical and infrastructure decisions relating to data and metadata services to
ensure the most effective outcomes for the future.

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Introduction
The world is awash in digital data, and the management, organisation, access
and preservation of this digital data is critical to the success of the knowledge
economy and society as a whole (Berman, 2008).

Though the burden and cost of managing research data outputs falls on the
shoulders of the researchers themselves. Finding, organizing, documenting,
formatting, intellectual property are yet another addition to researchers already
busy workloads. It is not surprising that a survey carried out by the Finnish
Social Science Data Archive (FSD) found that only 12% of respondents
archived their data in an institutional repository with adequate metadata (Kuula
and Borg, 2008).

In this paper we offer some of the benefits to open access data, provide
examples of government initiatives relevant to the remote sensing community
which intend to relieve the researcher of data deluge burden, and detail some
of the technologies being used to support this.

Benefits of open access to data

Making research data publicly accessible, discoverable and re-usable has
many advantages. Some of which are measurable, but many which aren’t. One
disadvantage where cost is difficult to quantify is the duplication of data
amongst different research groups and institutions funded through the same
channels. Whether it be two government departments doing an environmental
survey on the same geographical area, or two protein crystallographers
determining the crystal structure of the same protein. Encouraging data re-use
through open access to data is not a measurable benefit, but is definitely a
perceived befit by many researchers for reducing the cost of data duplication
(Kuula and Borg, 2008).

Open access to data can also enable innovative research beyond initial
observers intentions. This has been demonstrated in the bibliometric analysis
of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) publication statistics (Lagerstrom, 2010).
In this study, the author shows that over time publications on archived HST
data eclipse the publications from authors of the original study – studies of
which enabled the original data collection.

In today’s world of fast paced research and significant scientific discovery,

accountability and validation of research is paramount. Though the Alliance for
Human Research Protection (http://www.ahrp.org) suggest that a majority of
scientific journals are not in a position to validate research claims unless
researchers submit all raw data along with the publication (Sharav, 2006).

Probably the most measurable benefit of open access to data is its affect on
increased citation rates. Following the citation history of 85 micro array trails

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from 1999-2003, Piwowar et al. (2007) discovered that the 48% of trials which
had open data to support the publication received 85% of the citations.

Trends towards open data

In Australia and worldwide, views on accessibility of publicly funded data and
research outcomes are changing. In July 2010, the Australian Dept. of Finance
and Deregulation made an announcement of open government (Tanner, 2010),
with amendments made to the Freedom of Information Act based on
recommendations from the Gov 2.0 taskforce (http://gov2.net.au/). A key
component of this announcement is the emphasis on open data:

“strengthening citizen’s rights of access to information, establishing a

pro-disclosure culture across Australian Government agencies including
through online innovation, and making government information more
accessible and usable” (Tanner, 2010).

Similarly in the US, the Obama administration has introduced a culture of open
government with the Open Government Initiative
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/open). The flow on affect from this has encouraged
the National Science Foundation to enforce a two-page data management and
sharing plan to be submitted with each research grant submission (Mervis,
2010).

In Australia, when applying for a research grant with the ARC or NMHRC there
is no such requirement for a data management plan or data sharing plan.
Though, the NHMRC has published the Australian Code for the Responsible
Conduct of Research (NHMRC, 2007). In which, they detail recommendations
for the ongoing management and archival of data created out of publicly funded
research, the ownership around the data, and the support of appropriate
access to data.

These trends have also given rise to a new profession – the “data scientist”. In
2005, the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation
published Long-Lived Digital Data Collections: Enabling Research and
Education in the 21st Century (NSBA, 2005), which began a dialogue about the
importance of data preservation, and introduced the issue of the care and
feeding of an emerging group they identified as “data scientists”:

“The interests of data scientists—the information and computer

scientists, database and software engineers and programmers,
disciplinary experts, curators and expert annotators, librarians, archivists,
and others, who are crucial to the successful management of a digital
data collection—lie in having their creativity and intellectual contributions
fully recognized.” (Bell, 2009)

Australian national collaborative infrastructure initiatives

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There are a number of initiatives occurring at a national scale that are relevant
to the remote sensing community.

The Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) is project promoting

terrestrial ecosystem science, through the deployment of instrumentation,
creation of relevant data products, and the implementation of data delivery
services for access to data (http://www.tern.org.au/). The projects three main
focus areas are eco-informatics, flux data, and biophysical mapping and remote
sensing data.

The Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) is a distributed set of

equipment and data-information services which collectively contribute to
meeting the needs of marine climate research in Australia (http://imos.org.au).
The data is made available to researchers through the electronic Marine
Information Infrastructure (eMII) which makes most of it’s data available as
NetCDF through the IMOS portal (http://imos.aodn.org.au/webportal/)

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) has been established as

organization to promote and enable the sharing of research data in Australia
(http://ands.org.au/). ANDS has many roles in acting as a funding agency,
providing advice and expertise in the field of research data management and
policy, providing software infrastructure services to assist in good data
management practice, and the development of the Australian Research Data
Commons (ARDC) as the central location for access to all publicly funded
research data in Australia (http://services.ands.org.au).

Technologies and standardisation

There is a movement world wide and in Australia, for open access to data from
government departments and research institutions. But once the data has been
made public, how do we discover information we need, and make efficient use
of it?

Using community agreed standards for metadata and data products, and
deploying standard data delivery services with API’s (Application Programming
Interfaces) is at the upmost importance for ensuring ease of uptake, usefulness
to potential users, and enabling innovative applications to be developed. It is
for this reason, that the spatial data focused NCRIS (National Collaborative
Research Infrastructure Strategy) initiatives have led by example in deploying
data delivery services according to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC),
Data Access Protocol (DAP), and ANZLIC/ISO19115 Geographic information
standards.

The OGC (http://www.opengeospatial.org) standards relevant to the remote

sensing community that are in use are the Web Mapping Service (WMS) for the
delivery of mapping products over the web, the Web Coverage Service (WCS)
for the delivery of coverage data which is not in map form, and Web Feature

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Services (WFS) for the delivery of geospatial information which is not a
coverage.

The Data Access Protocol (http://opendap.org/) is a NASA community standard,

and is being used extensively by groups like IMOS for the delivery of
multidimensional coverage data in NetCDF and HDF formats. The DAP allows
clients the ability to subset data across multiple dimensions, including across
spatial regions of interest.

The ISO19115 Geographic information metadata standard is a flexible and

semi-generic metadata format for describing geographic datasets and services
(ISO, 2003). In Australian and New Zealand the ISO19115 profile has been
extended by ANZLIC the Spatial Information Council (http://www.anzlic.org.au)
to produce the ANZLIC Metadata Profile (ANZLIC, 2007). The ISO19115
standard has an implementation in an application called Geonetwork
(http://www.osgeo.org/geonetwork), and has been extended to support the
ANZLIC profile with the creation of the BlueNet Metadata Entry and Search
Tool (MEST, http://www.bluenet.org.au/MEST_intro.html). The
Geonetwork/MEST is being utilised across the TERN and IMOS projects, and
also within state and federal government agencies for the registration and
discovery of geographic data collections, as well as for the registration of DAP,
WFS, WCS, WMS and other service end points.

Conclusion
In this article we have detailed the benefit of open access to data, and that
open data is not just beneficial to the researcher of the original study, but also
beneficial to future scientific endeavours. We have shown that cultural and
practical shift to open data in science is being supported by governments
locally and internationally, and that the burden does not have to lie on the
shoulders of researchers. We have also outlined some technologies relevant
to the remote sensing community that are being utilised by national initiatives,
and that early engagement with the remote sensing community will encourage
the correct technological decisions to ensure future prosperity.

References
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