Solta 2011 Pre-Meeting Agenda

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Dear all,

  thank you again for expressing your interest in the Air Quality Community of Practice meeting in Solta, Croatia (23-25 August 2011). The motto of the workshop is "Connecting air quality data: from virtual to real", and by this we imply that there shall be enough room for discussions so that actual obstacles can be identified and both a vision and a workplan can be designed how to move this forward. In order to make efficient use of our time in Croatia, we ask you all to prepare for the workshop in the following ways (aside from arranging your travel etc.):

 1.) at the beginning, short (3-5 slides) Powerpoint presentations should be given as introduction to you as a person and the institution you are coming from (1 slide), your most prominent research/development topic(s) (1-2 slides), your current involvement in interoperability issues, the GEO process etc. (1-2 slides). Presenting these slides shouldn't take more than 6 minutes each, so that we get through this introduction in a little more than 2 hours.

 2.) we would then like to assemble a list of the "systems" that are out there right now and briefly assess for each of them where they are in terms of development (what is already working, what is planned next, what doesn't work yet?). In this context, "systems" not only refers to running WCS servers, but also includes the standards (WCS, CF, etc.) and in some cases other databases that are not yet "hooked up" to the network. For this, we ask each team of people working on a specific system to prepare some text to answer these points in the discussion. Please bring this as MS Office word file so that we can merge the contributions "online" while we are there.

 3.) to make sure that we achieve a common understanding of the data sets which are already networked or shall be networked in the near to mid-future, we shall then review the list that Rudy has compiled and posted on http://*******

 4.) next, we shall try to identify common issues and problems with the current systems based on the input from 2. In order to help structuring this information, we suggest to group issues and problems from 2 into the following categories (we can of course redefine these categories at the meeting if the discussions suggest so):
  -- standard definitions (clarity, ambiguity, completeness, ...)
  -- standard development and documentation
  -- platform issues, portability
  -- coding language(s), code interchangeability
  -- coding style and software development approaches
  -- organisation of data
  -- data formats, standard compliance
  -- data access
  -- performance
  -- flexibility
  -- user friendliness
  -- meeting user demands (fitness for purpose)
  -- governance, responsibilities, etc.
 Note that we don't deal with metadata yet - this will be topic of another session.

 5.) hopefully, the synthesis view from 4 will give us some good guidance how to structure specific discussion sessions on the way to improve the situation. In these discussions we aim to identify manageable work packages where possible, but we should also arrive at clear statements about obstacles that can in principle be overcome but where we have no organisational structure, no funding or no clear idea yet how to do it.

 6.) after looking into the near future, we would like to go a bit further and let you develop your dreams about the situation in 10 years from now. We think that this might be most fruitful if we define end-to-end use cases and illuminate these from various directions. Can interoperable systems be developed to a stage that they can target different user communities (from scientists to managers, media people and the general public)? Do we need special purpose systems? How can users find out about (each) system? What shall be common among such systems and where can they differ? In this context we would also like to bring up the big issues of data quality, traceability and metadata management as these will be pivotal to the future development and they will ultimately determine success or failure of these applications. For these discussions we will approach a few of you individually and ask you to prepare short "seed presentations" to give your view on some of these points.

 7.) at the end of the workshop we would like to come back to the near term workplan and review it briefly in light of the results obtained from the longer-term future discussions. This work plan shall be a tangible result from the workshop and we hope that it can then also be used to attract further funding to continue and expand on the ongoing activities.