Global Change Information System

The US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) develops and curates the Global Change Information System (GCIS)^[1] to establish "data interfaces and interoperable repositories of climate and global change data which can be easily and efficiently accessed, integrated with other data sets, maintained and expanded over time." ^[2] The initial focus of GCIS is to support the United States Third National Climate Assessment (NCA3), which is to publish reports that enhance the transparency and ability of decision-makers to understand the conclusions and use of the underlying data for their own purposes. ^[3][4]

Scope of work

The project scope includes analyzing alterations in climate, land use and land cover, natural resources including water, agriculture and biodiversity, atmospheric composition, chemical composition and ecological systems that may alter the Earth's capacity to sustain life.

Global change research includes activities aimed at describing and understanding the interactive physical, chemical and biological processes that regulate the Earth system; the unique environment that the Earth provides for life; changes that are occurring in the Earth system; and the manner in which such systems, environments and changes are influenced by human actions.^[2]

Provenance and semantics

GCIS has developed information models and ontology to represent the content structure of the NCA3 and its associated provenance information and has been extending its models to incorporate more global change information. Records of objects and relationships within the GCIS are represented in a database for the Semantic Web, which can be queried using the SPARQL language. GCIS assigns globally unique persistent identifiers to all of the entities, activities, and agents relevant to provenance. Each identifier is mapped to a uniform resource identifier (URI) in the GCIS namespace,^[5] allowing use of those identifiers for the Semantic Web and other linked data systems. By categorizing, annotating, and linking provenance information, the GCIS becomes capable of answering provenance-tracking questions about global change research.^[6][7]

GCIS ontology

The GCIS Ontology^[8] promotes representation and documentation by incorporating the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s recommendation on provenance modeling (PROV) into the design. ^[9][10] The ontology uses the namespace prefix GTIS. A conceptual map of the GCIS Ontology version 1.2^[11] is accessible on the Web.

References

1. "Global Change Information System - GCIS". data.globalchange.gov. Retrieved 2016-05-16.
2. US Global Change Research Program, 2012. The National Global Change Research Plan 2012–2021: A Strategic Plan for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, 132 pp.
3. About the Global Change Information System
4. Ma, X., Fox, P., Tilmes, C., Jacobs, K., Waple, A., 2014. Capturing and presenting provenance of global change information. Nature Climate Change 4 (6), 409-413.
5. "Global Change Information System - GCIS". data.globalchange.gov. Retrieved 2015-11-27.
6. Tilmes, C., Fox, P., Ma, X., McGuinness, D., Privette, A.P., Smith, A., Waple, A., Zednik, S., Zheng, J., 2013. Provenance representation for the National Climate Assessment in the Global Change Information System. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing 51 (11), 5160-5168.
7. Ma, X., Zheng, J.G., Goldstein, J., Zednik, S., Fu, L., Duggan, B., Aulenbach, S., West, P., Tilmes, C., Fox, P., 2014. Ontology engineering in provenance enablement for the National Climate Assessment. Environmental Modelling & Software 61, 191-205.
8. "GCIS Ontology". data.globalchange.gov. Retrieved 2016-05-16.
9. Groth, P., Moreau, L., (eds.) 2013. PROV-Overview: An Overview of the PROV Family of Documents
10. "GCIS Ontology". data.globalchange.gov. Retrieved 2015-11-27.
11. "GCIS_Ontology_v1_2". cmapspublic3.ihmc.us. Retrieved 2016-05-16.

 This article incorporates public domain material from the U.S. Global Change Research Program document "About the Global Change Information System".