Abstract
This paper explores for the first time the contents, structure and relationships across institutions and disciplines of a global Big Earth Data cyber-infrastructure: the Global Earth Observation System of System (GEOSS). The analysis builds on 1.8 million metadata records harvested in GEOSS. Because this set includes almost all the major large data collections in GEOSS, the analysis represents more than 80% of all the data made available through this global system. We explore two major aspects: the collaborative networks and the thematic coverage in GEOSS. The first connects the contributing organisations through the more than 200,000 keywords used in the systems, and then explores who is citing whom, a proxy for of institutional thickness. The thematic coverage is analysed through neural network algorithms, first on the keywords, and then on the corpus of 653 million lemmatised lower case words built from the titles and abstracts of all 1.8 million metadata records. The findings not only give a good overview of the GEOSS data universe, but offer immediate priorities on how to increase the usability of GEOSS through improved data management, and the opportunity to augment the metadata with high level concept that synthetise well the contents of the data-set.
Highlights
This paper explores for the first time the contents, structure and relationships across institutions and disciplines of a global Big Earth Data cyber-infrastructure: the Global Earth Observation System of System (GEOSS)
The paper is organised as follows: after this first introduction, Sections 2 and 3 provide the background on GEO and GEOSS, respectively, Section 4 introduces the research questions, Section 5 explains the characteristics of the data used for the project, Section 6 presents the key findings, Section 7 discusses the importance of the work in the context of Big Earth Data analytics and Section 8 concludes with an indication of the stages of the research
The first question we asked was: “who are the data providers in GEOSS”? Simple question but not so easy to answer because there are several fields in the metadata that offer relevant information such as originator, contact organisation, distributor and contributor, referring to either the data or the metadata record, and in a system of fully autonomous data systems with many different policies and practices, it is not immediately clear what the results of the enquiry mean
Summary
This paper explores for the first time the contents, structure and relationships across institutions and disciplines of a global Big Earth Data cyber-infrastructure: the Global Earth Observation System of System (GEOSS). GEOSS has had a remarkable success and includes thousands of data providers and hundreds of millions of data resources, mostly available on a full and open access basis (Nativi et al, 2015) This wealth of resources is increasingly looked upon to support key international initiatives such as the Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2015), the Paris agreement on climate change (United Nations, 2016) and the Sendai framework on disaster risk reduction (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015). The paper is organised as follows: after this first introduction, Sections 2 and 3 provide the background on GEO and GEOSS, respectively, Section 4 introduces the research questions, Section 5 explains the characteristics of the data used for the project, Section 6 presents the key findings, Section 7 discusses the importance of the work in the context of Big Earth Data analytics and Section 8 concludes with an indication of the stages of the research
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