Presented by Chris Higgins at the Tenth Plenary Session of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO-X), 15-16 January 2014 - Geneva, Switzerland

1. COBWEB Project
Citizens Observatories Side Event,
GEO-X Plenary, Geneva, Switzerland.
15th Jan, 2014
Chris Higgins
Project Coordinator
chris.higgins@ed.ac.uk
http://cobwebproject.eu/

2. Citizen Observatory Web
• 4 year research project
• Crowdsourced environmental data to aid
decision making
• Introduce quality measures and reduce
uncertainty
• Combine crowdsourced data with existing
sources of data

3. Project Partners

4. Essential context – WNBR
• UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programmes
World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR)
– Sites of excellence to foster harmonious integration
of people and nature for sustainable development
through participation, knowledge sharing, poverty
reduction and human well-being improvements,
cultural values and society's ability to cope with
change, thus contributing to the Millennium
Development Goals
• 610 reserves in 117 countries

5. COBWEB Biosphere Reserves
UK (Wales): Biosffer Dyfi
– Development work
concentrated here
• Germany: Wadden See and Hallig Islands
• Greece: Mount Olympus & Gorge of Samaria
• Left open possibility of expansion to further BRs
later in project

6. What are we going to build?
A number of demonstrator mobile phone
applications
– Exactly what, deliberately left open and
subject to discussion with stakeholders
3 pilot case study areas:
1. Validating earth
observation products
2. Biological monitoring
3. Flooding

7. Requirements driving architecture

8. Emerging Architecture

9. Making data available through GEOSS
• Data will be available via OGC Web Services,
eg, WFS, WMS, SOS
• Discoverable via CSW
• Will continue working within the context of the
Architecture Implementation Pilots (AIP)
– AIP-6: COBWEB contribution concentrated on
authentication and Single Sign On
– Some possibilities for future AIP collaboration:
•
•
Address additional access control questions identified by
GEO community
Perhaps work within context of specific SBA’s

10. Technology that can be used by other observatories
• “Data collected should be made available
through the GEOSS without any
restrictions”
• But, we must address “questions of
privacy…”
• In AIP-6 we piloted the use of access
management federations

11. WP5: Privacy assurance, access management
• COBWEB about environmental, not
personal data
• Some kinds of protected data that may be
encountered during the project:
– Personal information, eg, name, email address
– Location protected species
– Reference data from European National Mapping
and Cadastral Agencies
– Conflated data

12. Why put effort into federated access management?
• Frequently, SDI content and service
providers need to know who is accessing
their valuable resource
• The ability for a group of organisations with
common objectives, ie, a federation, to
securely exchange high value information is
a powerful SDI enabler
• Identified as a priority in GEOSS
– Architecture Implementation Pilot 5
– GEO Infrastructure Implementation Board

13. COBWEB/GEOSS AIP-6 Federation
Service Provider (SP)
Discovery Service (DS)
Catapult
Catapult
Identity Provider (IdP)
Trust Gateway (TG)
to OpenID
CUAHSI*
CUAHSI*
NASA Ames
NASA Ames
Secure Dimensions
Secure Dimensions
“GEOSS user” SingleSign-On
MEEO
MEEO
EarthServer (FP7) project
EarthServer (FP7) project
Google
Google
OpenId
OpenId
Kst. GDI.DE
Kst. GDI.DE
University of Edinburgh
University of Edinburgh
*: Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science

14. Where we are in the project…
• Month 15 of 48
• November 2013: Milestone 2:
– End of design and initial stakeholder
engagement phase. Start implementing
platform
• November 2014: Milestone 3:
– First Welsh demonstrator completed and
ready for testing in the field
chris.higgins@ed.ac.uk

16. Dimensions of Interoperability
From the European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European eGovernment Services
(http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Docb0db.pdf?id=31597)