Summit highlights the importance of environmental information for decision-making

The Eye on Earth Summit addressed the crucial importance of environmental and societal information and networking to decision-making. It focused on topics related to environmental information networking, including Disaster Management, Oceans and Blue Carbon, Water Security, Innovative Cities, and Networks Beyond Information Technology. Well-known Oceanographer Dr Sylvia Earle discusses the Blue Carbon initiative at the summit (Picture: Wim Hugo)

SAEON Systems Engineer Wim Hugo recently attended the Eye on Earth Summit in Abu Dhabi as a participant in WorkGroup 3, tasked with the development of discussion papers to guide future ICT infrastructure development in support of Environmental Science.

Wim, a co-author of the White Paper on crowd sourcing and citizen science, presented the paper at the summit on behalf of the workgroup.

A summit declaration was developed, aimed at making a substantial input to the Rio+20 event in mid 2012. The summit also identified several special initiatives, and SAEON will remain a participant in two of these:

• The ‘Global Network of Networks’ initiative, aimed at integration of the widest possible collection of resources (going beyond data, to initiatives, communities of practice, and knowledge networks) in a self-scalable and self-maintaining architecture.
• The ‘Eye on Water Security’ initiative aims to further develop interoperability standards for the broader water resource management domain.

There is also a possibility of further collaboration with the European Environment Agency on Crowd sourcing and Citizen Science. This collaboration will be discussed in March 2012 with a view to integrating SAEON efforts with the Eye on Earth platform developed by the Agency.