Interoperability and standards adoption FAO’s inputs (ICT2010 Networking Session)

Interoperability and standards adoption: FAO’s inputs

a) FAO’s experience in the development and adoption of standardsb) Current SDMX developmentsc) A conjecture: how an e-infrastructure will help

Marc Taconet, Anton Ellenbroek, FAO

Networking sessionSeptember 2010

Brussels (Belgium)

www.d4science.euD4Science-II project |

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

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a) FAO’s experience in the development and adoption of standards

Various types of standards – FAO either leads development, or adopts specific vocabularies

ASFIS list of species ASFA thesaurus

name space vocabularies AGMES: Agriculture Metadata Element Set FIMES: Fisheries Metadata Element Set

exchange schemas (this later becomes less and less important in the Linked Open Data world)

AGRIS-AP: AGRIS Application Profile FIMES

description languages / methodologies RDF

Networking sessionSeptember 2010, Brussels (Belgium)

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a) FAO’s experience in the development and adoption of standards

Minimum requirements for successful adoption of standards

Involve a “Community of Practice” reaching critical mass, motivated by:

common objective value added services

for Metadata schemas, facilitate adoption: through Mediators

facilitating the articulation of new standard with established practices and standards

provide capacity building in developing countries environments


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SDMX is used to achieve specific objectives for statistical data exchange:

Describe data providers and their datasets Harmonize often poor and incomplete data and manage

provenance Extract and map codes and hierarchies using semantic

technologies Transform data to reliable SDMX data Manage SDMX data through a registry Disseminate data-sets

b1) Current SDMX developments


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b1) Current SDMX developments

FAO has gained experience with SDMX ...

... including perception of its limitations

SDMX adaptation is limited by: it’s a complex model, the changing specifications the non-comprehensive toolset the small size of the open source community requires changes to ways we handle code lists:

• e.g. is required formal versioning and historical codelists management


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b2) enhancing SDMX framework

after 18 months of work on SDMX, including through collaboration with Eurostat,

FAO-FI has taken action at FAO corporate level to overcome

... some of these limitations

Strengthening community of practice OpenSDMX initiated FAO Corporate IT Division now contributes to this effort FAOSTAT3 will strengthen SDMX capabilities in FAO, and

collaborating with FAOSTAT3 through OpenSDMX facilitates corporate level adaptation


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in current FAO infrastructure

Facilitating the articulation of SDMX with established standards:

SDMX capabilities are strengthened with semantic technologies

Flexible, easy to access data structures RDF services to external applications Flexible mapping and transformation services Facilitate machine to machine communication


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More potential for SDMX in D4Science infrastructure

additional mechanisms and services that facilitate third-parties in the implementation of standards

SDMX and XML technologies provide a solid base for the collection and management of observational data

D4cience offers transformation services Reference data management Registries offer discovery and access Integration with geospatial services RDF for machine to machine communication


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c) a conjecture: how an e-infrastructure will help

Context: evolving business needs

Ecosystem-based fisheries management policy making increasingly based on multi-disciplinary information sources

Opportunities: ever increasing power of e-infrastructures

an ecosystem of data infrastructures enables various communities to cohabitate;

while each community specializes in its own domain, there is incentive to share and use services from other domains.


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A scenario that will facilitate the adoption of standards (1): by bolstering Transformation services that link across

domains, Statistical, Environmental, GeoSpatial, Social, etc. Example: SDMX can support time-series data exchange, species data

could use DarwinCore, AND they could refer to each other

more ecosystem services available will attract more users these users will be “passive” adopters of standards through

mediators Editing interfaces for registering time series in SDMX format Harmonization of vocabularies among existing classifications

the community which shares maintenance and development effort will seek to minimize the number of standards


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A scenario that will facilitate the adoption of standards (2): this move might be facilitated by the intrusion of semantic

web and Linked Open Data (LOD) environments high computing power will facilitate an increased

development of LOD with LOD, adoption of standards focuses more on the

strengthening of vocabularies and resource description framework

in a LOD environment, data exchange schemas loose importance


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For discussion in Networking session

1. Which set of core standards for e-infrastructures which are the major types of standards we think will have

to be handled (eg SDMX, DarwinCore, Spatial standards, ISO19115, ....)

which information domains can SDMX realistically fulfil Statistical time-series Extend to observational data: vessel recordings, trade, species ?

2. Which role for Linked Open Data and RDF framework in e-infrastructures ?


Education

Interoperability and standards adoption FAO’s inputs (ICT2010 Networking Session)