Agclimate telecon 2014-03-03

Back to Ag & Climate Workspace

Agenda

Emily's ESIP Strategic Actions and agclim items (currently, one on enhancing the spreadsheet on remote sensing data useful for agriculture)
How to enhance the spreadsheet (e.g., testbed project? collaboration w/ other ESIP groups?)
Preparation for July ESIP on the wiki and on the Commons - agclim session related to the spreadsheet as a resource (?)
Google for data
- ASPRS Aerial Data Portal

Minutes:

[Bill] just jotting down some notes ...

summer meeting organized around use cases; possibly jointly with Energy & Climate
use cases would demonstrate how satellite data could be used and help populate spreadsheet on remote sensing data
Brian and Earth Resilience Toolkit "exemplars" (use cases) (examples from Climate Resilience Toolkit)
invite someone from Toolkit effort for April telecon to talk about exemplars

Discussion focused on three main components (all of which were related):

ESIP’s Strategic Action Plan - a 5 year plan for 2020, put together mostly by Emily Lawe (Spreadsheet): Specifically how the Agriculture and Climate Cluster could help with the 21st line within the 1st goal: To Increase the Use and Value of Earth Science information.
The Agriculture and Climate Cluster’s own spreadsheet of data useful for agriculture (Spreadsheet) and how to enhance this spreadsheet, both populating it with more data and making it more useable by the community - and potentially broadening the range to fit within the Strategic Action Plan (above).
Ruth’s Data Inventory/Workshop proposal (“a google for data”) - and how the Agriculture and Climate cluster might help with that.

Minutes as follows:

Introduction to the Strategic Action Plan. Posed question: What are we (as a cluster) planning and how can it fin into this Strategic Action Plan.
The Strategic Action Plan consists of 4-5 high level goals. Goal 1 includes: increase use and value of earth science information. This could include compiling satellite data potentially useful for the ag. community and beyond. What we as a cluster have already: spreadsheet including, precip data, etc. How can we enhance/enlarge that effort to fit in with the Strategic Action Plan, making it ESIP-wide.

The action/deliverable would be a searchable data and characteristics. There would be 2 “lead groups” - Agriculture and Climate and Energy and Climate, as we both have similar inventory goals within our clusters.
The action/deliverable would be something more than a static spreadsheet. Maybe more of a tool, which would involve other ESIP groups (Discovery and Semantics) -- take the original spreadsheet, enhance it, expand it and make a portal - other ESIP groups could help with the backend? Maybe this could be a Testbed project??
Original/current Agriculture and Climate Cluster spreadsheet was used for LTAR and Climate Hubs. The strategic plan concept would be bigger/broader - not just Ag specific.
Thoughts: data.gov - list of databases that are “tagged” with different communities such as agriculture… so is data.gov already doing what we are looking to do?

We don’t want to duplicate what other services are doing… so what can we do especially in the context of ESIP-wide groups, what can we do to uniquely contribute -- There is still a need for the ag. community (and possibly communities at large) to have a better/easier database to search and utilize.

Thoughts: GEOSS -- can highlight tools and datasets, catalog of catalogs so to speak. This idea of being more searchable/useable is already a conversation at GEOSS right now, where “community shortcuts” would be setup to make it easier to search and use.

One potential thought for a unique component:

The Climate Resilience Toolkit is a toolkit that tied tools and datasets to a use case, an example and scenario. This could be a way that ESIP could contribute to datasets? With value added to a collection of data WITH use cases which could “spell out” the datasets - so it would address a need by being an example based search. The idea would be for users to be able to start with a question of interest, which would be tied into a “package” of data.

Perhaps this is a way to help community members solve problems and utilize those cases as a use case for the toolkit.

This could also tie into the Ad/Commercial idea with Ruth Duerr (NSIDC):
Ruth is submitting an NSF Earth Cube proposal for a series of workshops to develop standards for advertizing datasets, especially data not in official repositories. Something that producers of data can put on their websites to make their datasets searchable/findable by a larger community.
The goals would be to Identify data that is not a part of a major data center and to have the data producers help decide what fields could/should be filled out as advertisements of the data (so that different communities with different datasets may fill out different fields of information unique to their field) - This proposal would work out how best to decide those fields and reach those communities, so that data can be easily searched and logged. This would be accomplished by workshops (possibly co-located with ESIP meetings and/or on the web).

In preparing for our July meeting:

Could we organize a session around our spreadsheet as a resource and enhancing it to meet the larger goal? The Visoneers are putting together the meeting at large, perhaps checking in with them or listening to their telecons would be beneficial.
One possibility for our July meeting session, would be to have a session with these workshops in mind. How the Agriculture and Climate community might help with this larger effort to find and catalog these “hidden” datasets.
Both our cluster and the Energy and Climate cluster have been identified as clusters of interest, possibly together? In July we could have a combined/joint session? To discuss how to compile inventory information… and how this all fits into ESIP’s Strategic Plan?

IN GENERAL: We could focus on Use Cases

pull together datasets and “solving” a use case
identify what would be the core elements of the ads
use cases could show how the spreadsheet/portal could help
this would also potentially find data to add to the spreadsheet.
help accomplish things for the use cases
and in turn populate the spreadsheet with that data.
Climate Hubs/LTAR might have a higher level use cases, with regional/national application? This could be modeled after the Climate Resilience Toolkit… but maybe a bit more complicated with the use cases? research oriented? nuanced? LTAR and Climate Hubs -- encapsulates large range of interests and uses.
Use cases could relate specifically to resilience -- which is the theme of the next meeting.
Related to: disaster planning and climate change (many possible Agriculture connections)
Brian: conceptual design document for climate resilience toolkit… how it worked and how it’s put together. He poked around on the toolkit to see how the data is organized… no specific document on how it’s organized, but maybe we could get someone to tell us the structure of the tool kit. Brian has an idea… but also knows who helped organize the data (David Herring of NOAA climate change office.)
Examples effort -- show how data can be used. show what data is necessary. Populate the data inventory… develop the use cases and talk about the development.

For our next telecon:

Bring in someone who knows how the Climate Resilience Toolkit data is organized and how they determine the use cases. Brian was going to see if someone could present at the next telecon in April. 7th 3pm
Energy and Climate cluster might be interested in this sort of use-case structure? - Discuss with them? Also, do we want to do a joint session in July?
Ruth’s proposal - know that as we go forward, we should keep this larger effort in mind.

Attendees: Bill Teng, Nancy Hoebelheinrich, Lindsay Barbieri, Brian Wee, Justin Goldstein, Arif Albayrak