Dealing with huge quantities of date, the so called Big Data, along structural organised models, is a key prerequisite when tackling ecological scientific issues and is one of the main fields of action for LifeWatch. It is increasingly demanded to host data resources in public accessible archives ensuring transparency, reproducibility and sustainability of scientific research and its results. It is of vital importance that in this process, data are described in a rigorous manner, standardised by metadata, essential to deeply understand data and make them accessible, interpretable and reusable over time. Virtual Research Environments and Web Services are opening new opportunities for researchers, making innovative collaborative environments available to researchers, allowing the use of computation and stocking distributes resources. In this session, LifeWatch Italy aims at gathering experiences, models and case studies on the use of data and metadata, web services and Virtual Research Environments applied to study of biodiversity and ecosystems.
In this session, LifeWatch Italy calls for contributions on:
- Potential of ICT platforms in ensuring availability of data at the long term, and combining the efforts to collect, share and manage data resources.
- Development and use of web services for management and analysis of Big Data.
- Potential of Virtual Research Environments in producing new knowledge.
Investigating biodiversity and ecosystems relies on the integration of data resources coming from different sources, collected at heterogeneous temporal and spatial scales (.e. long term ecological series). Considering the growing volume of data, many projects and infrastructures started developing services for a better management of information, making it accessible and re usable ultimately creating new knowledge. In parallel, standards, services and models of governance have been created to facilitate data and system interoperability. LifeWatch Italy decided for a strategic approach based on the use of semantic resources, such as controlled vocabularies and ontologies, to support interoperability among different data infrastructures. LifeWatch Italy aims at gathering experiences, models and case studies on the use of semantic resources for biodiversity and ecosystem research.
In this session, LifeWatch Italy calls for contributions on:
- Implementation and use of controlled vocabularies.
- Development and design specific domain ontologies.
- Interoperability of data on ecosystems and biodiversity.
Citizen Science foresees active voluntary participation, with different level of engagement, of a non-specialised public in scientific activities, creating a mutual exchange among scientists and citizens through involvement experiences. ICT tools and resources to collect and analyse citizens’ observations, as well as the possibility to access training programmes, are key elements to support such initiatives. LifeWatch Italy is particularly interested in Citizen Science, and in developing and making available web services, applications and ICT platforms to facilitate, from a technological point of view, citizens’ involvement in this interaction, from data collection, crowdsourcing, to result analysis. Moreover, LifeWatch Italy makes available learning environments and gaming resources, essential to provide students, particularly those in high school, the key competences to understand the context surrounding them.
In this session, LifeWatch Italy calls for contributions on:
- Community involvement in monitoring activities, models of public participation to Citizen Science initiatives, best practices and issues connected to the use of data collected by citizens.
- ICT Platforms, tools, applications and web services for Citizen Science, Communication of Science and Education.
- Best practices and case studies applied to ecology focusing on eLearning and gaming (Serious Games).