Man-made climate change is the great challenge of our time. At the political level, there are numerous initiatives to meet this challenge. At the heart of these initiatives is often the integration of local, national and global data with simulation models and modern analysis methods.
The European Union (EU) has adopted the European Green Deal: A comprehensive digital information space to make it possible to collect, store and use data and information on environmental and climate issues in the EU. This is intended to combat environmental pollution and support biodiversity, among other things.
The “All Data for Green Deal (AD4GD)” project enables co-design and shape this data space as an open hub for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data and standards-based services.
There is still no easy access to all data of the involved stakeholders (companies from the economy, citizens, administrations, research). A lot of data is either not available at all or is provided via non-standardized services. This complicates their further analysis and reduces usability. The capacities of processing services and platforms, including cloud, high performance computing and edge computing, cannot be exploited. The project aims to fill these technological gaps with cross-system approaches.
The project will combine and integrate data from:
- Remote sensing (satellites, aircraft or drones),
- established virtual research environments and research infrastructures,
- Internet of Things (IoT),
- Socio-economic data (health data, population density, employment data, etc.), and
- INSPIRE and Citizen Science (CitSci)
to enable in an interoperable, scalable, and reliable manner.
Another major issue is the diversity of data needed to both better understand climate change and evaluate the impact of deployed policies. These data exist in different formats on different platforms.
Conceptual models are used when generating data. These conceptual models describe the data modeler’s view of the real world, a section of which is described by the data. Each person has his or her own conceptual model. Consequently, without standardized approaches, the diversity of data is accompanied by a diversity of conceptual models. The result is data that can only be integrated with great effort.
AD4GD addresses this problem. The project explores the integration of semantically heterogeneous data and conceptual models. AD4GD will develop solutions that allow the integration of all data in differently composed committees and thus significantly simplify decision-making. These solutions will form the backbone of the “Data Spaces” currently being developed in the European context. The OGC will bring this European solution into the global discussion to address the global nature of the current problems.
In this context, particular mention should be made of OGC Rainbow, which currently represents the state-of-the-art in the context of semantic interoperability. OGC Rainbow manages to integrate and interconnect different concepts and data models derived from them by integrating standardized mechanisms.