International Information Management activities in China inspire confidence

Avinash Chuntharpursat, SAEON's Information Management Coordinator, gets acquainted with a rather unresponsive Chinese warrior during his visit to China.

- By Avinash Chuntharpursat, Information Management Coordinator, SAEON

The 2007 Annual International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER) Conference held in Beijing, China was extremely eventful, as usual.

This was especially the case with this year's International Information Management (IM) activities. In organising the international activities, the Information Management Committee was particularly vibrant during the past year leading up to the Conference. Numerous email and teleconferences were held to deal with developments such as ontologies and data policies.

I had the privilege to present the development of the SAEON data policy, starting by taking it from an internationally based document to adjusting and incorporating local user requirements provided by the SAEON nodes. The potential for an international IM data policy was explored, but the ILTER committee decided to stick with an ethical/ philosophical approach to data management for the time being.

Highlights

One of the highlights of the IM activities was the discussions and subsequent decision that the current practise of using Ecological Metadata Language (EML) to manage ecological data be complemented by the addition of ontologies. This would bring the systems developed by the US (EML) and Europe (Ontologies) closer together.

Also investigated through presentations by the Global Biodiversity Information Framework (GBIF) representative was closer collaboration between GBIF and ILTER. At a local level, this would mean the development of closer ties between SAEON and SABIF (South African Biodiversity Information Framework), which falls under the auspices of the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI).

The IM team of the Chinese Ecological Research Network (CERN) provided an insightful demonstration of their Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and the impressive databases associated with it. These databases include a spatial database of ecological field stations, a 1x1 km meteorological grid database and a database for long-term monitoring. These databases are currently accessible by the network and general public in Chinese only, but developments towards an English site is underway.

Demand for spatial data

While the SAEON data portal is aimed at catering for all standard data types, the bulk of the data that is in demand seems to be spatial data. Noticing that CERN, being a larger and older network, has implemented a SDI certainly gives SAEON the confidence to forge ahead with its own collaborative GIS (CoGIS).

Of note was that the CERN spatial data infrastructure is based on the technology used by the old SA-ISIS programme, the precursor to the current CoGIS that SAEON, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and several other stakeholders are developing. The SA-ISIS was based on proprietary software and was meant to sell data; the CoGIS is based on opensource software and is designed to give free public access to data.

The conference wasn't all work though. A special word of thanks goes to the CERN information management team for arranging an infinitely worthwhile IM teambuilding exercise. Despite their language differences IM people from across the world know how to have fun.