These were three talks given in Australia during a short trip in November, 2010. I gave one in Canberra, and two on the Gold Coast.

British experience with building standards based networks for climate and environmental research

Presentation: pdf (5 MB)

This was the keynote talk for the Information Network Workshop, Canberra, November, 2010.

The talk covered organisational and technological drivers to network interworking, with some experience from the UK and European context, and some comments for the future.

All the other talks from the meeting are available on the osdm website.

Rethinking metadata to realise the full potential of linked scientific data

Presentation: pdf (3 MB)

Metadata Workshop, Gold Coast, November 2010

This talk begins with an introduction to our metafor taxonomy, and why metadata, and metadata tooling, are important. There is an extensive discussion of the importance of model driven architectures, and plans for extending our existing formalism to support both RDF and XML serialisations. We consider our the observations and measurements paradigm needs extension to support climate science, and discuss quality control annotation.

All the talks from this meeting are available on an [http://ands.org.au/events/metadataworkshop08-11-2010/index.html ANDS website].

Provenance, metadata and e-infrastructure to support climate science

Presentation: pdf (9 MB)

This was a keynote for the Australian e-Research Conference, 2010.

Abstract: The importance of data in shaping our day to day decisions is understood by the person on the street. Less obviously, metadata is important to our decision making: how up to date is my account balance? How does the cost of my broadband supply compare with the offer I just read in the newspaper? We just don’t think of those things as metadata (one persons data is another persons metadata). Similarly, the importance of data in shaping our future decisions about reacting to climate change is obvious. Less obvious, but just as important, is the provenance of the data:who produced it/them, how, using what technique, is the difficulty of the interpretation in anyway consistent with the skills of the interpreter? In this talk I’ll introduce some key parts of the metadata spectrum underlying our efforts to document climate data, for use now and into the future. In particular, we’ll discuss the information modelling and metadata pipeline being constructed to support the currently active global climate model inter-comparison project known as CMIP5. In doing so we’ll touch on the metadata activities of the European Metafor project, the software developments being sponsored by the US Earth System Grid and European IS-ENES projects, and how all these activities are being integrated into a global federated e-infrastructure.

All conference talks are available here.