Statistics on Interoperability Papers at Fall AGU Meetings

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Purpose and Procedure

In preparation for the AGU session: "Standards-Based Interoperability Among Tools and Data Services in the Earth Sciences" (Oral Session,Poster) we have performed a crude content analysis of Fall 2006 AGU abstracts. The purpose of this note is to empirically explore the current state of interoperability in information systems used in Earth Sciences as presented at the recent (2003-2006) meetings of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Procedure: The procedure for developing the statistics involve accessing the AGU Abstracts Database for the fall meetings of 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. The search was conducted using keywords that occurred in any of the abstract's fields including title, body, and keywords. Otherwise, the search was not confined, in other words the resulting list of abstracts was selected from the entire database for that year. The list of 21 analyzed abstracts mostly (18/21) includes contributions from the Earth Science Informatics domain. As seen below the classification of the contents is rather arbitrary and the overall analysis is exploratory.

Interoperability: Wikipedia defines Interoperability as the ability of products, systems, or business processes to work together to accomplish a common task. According to ISO/IEC 2382-01, it is the "The capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units". [1]

Context and Content of "Interoperability"

Searching for interoperability for the fall 2006 yielded thirty abstracts. Visual inspection of each abstract was performed to examine the context in which the interoperability was used. The pie chart below shows the number of abstracts for each context.

Of the thirty abstracts with interoperability, seven abstracts were classified as General since the context referred to general aspects of information interoperability. In three abstracts interoperability was used in the context of physical homogenization and integration of heterogeneous data. Another three abstracts dealt with the semantic aspect of interoperability, i.e. linking the meanings of different datasets. The largest group of seventeen abstracts incorporated interoperability with specific reference to applications using the suite of OGC Standards.

It is evident that Earth Science interoperabilityis closely linked to the suite of OGC Standards. (Note: I think that I was some what biased toward OGC at the expense of semantic interoperability)


InteropAGU2006 1.png
Plot comes from: Interoperability Trends Spreadsheet

Application Areas and Target Users

Half of the abstracts (11/21) pertain to application areas in Earth Science in general. While the other half is devoted to application that are targeted to either Earth Science sub domains (e.g. hydrology, ozone) or geographic (e.g. Antartica).

ApplicationDomain.pngTargetUsers.png
Plots come from: Interoperability Abstract Analysis Spreadsheet

The target users for the information systems were mostly for scientists (13/21). There are also significant efforts (5/21) devoted to public/educational users. Three papers on interoperability were "conceptual",e.g. data models, which makes them hard to classify.

Data Services

Data access services using WMS and WCS services are addressed in 17 of the abstracts. Eight abstracts indicated the use of WMS, three indicated the use of WCS Standards and six referred to both WMS and WCS.

DataAccessServices.png ServiceOperation.png
Plots come from: Interoperability Abstract Analysis Spreadsheet

The data service operations were mostly data access services (15) and data discovery services (2). Four contributions are devoted to data processing and orchestration of service chains. Nine abstracts containing interoperability include end user tools such as data browsers, the rest did not.

Trends in use of Interoperability

It is interesting to examine the four year (2003-2006) trend of interoperability use in AGU abstracts. The procedure was to count the number of abstracts for search terms: Interoperability, OGC, WMS, etc.

OPenDAP, one of the early interoperability protocols has been increasing from 2 in 2003 to 15-20 abstracts. The number of abstracts with the terms interoperability and web services increased from 10-15 in 2003 to 35-40 in 2006. In 2006 we also see the emergence (5 abstracts) of the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) communications protocol for 'pushing' data from the providers to the users.

InteropKeywords.png DataAccessRenderKeywords.png
Plots come from: Interoperability Trends Spreadsheet

The frequency of abstracts with the terms OGC, WCS, and WMS have increased more dramatically. OGC increased from 2 to 25 while WMS and WCS increased rose from 2 to about 10 abstracts.

It is not known how the total number of abstract at the Fall AGU meetings has changed.(need to find those numbers). However, over the same period, the use of general terms: Atmospheric and Oceanic, remained constant at about 250 each. Thus, the above growth of inteoperability terms indicates significant relative growth.

Tentative Observations and Implications of the Analysis

This is very crude, incomplete...

From the above it may be observed that:

  • The use of interoperability in abstracts has tripled between 2003 and 2006.
  • In 2006, interoperability mainly refers to the application of OGC Standard Protocols.
  • The OGC data access services, WMS and WCS are by far the most dominant.

What made Google Earth an instant hit? The cool appearance and user experience? Its openness and ease of mashing? Whatever is the cause, it clearly indicates that at times AGU scientists are willing and able to 'infuse' new technologies into their work in a blick.

It is meaningful to pursue the propagation of the WMS/WCS(WFS?) standards as the primary protocols for Earth Science data access.

It is hoped that the above provocative statements will promote constructive community discussion.

Rhusar 17:19, 7 November 2006 (EST)