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Melbourne hosts co-located GEO Committee meetings

The four GEO Committees plus the C4 met during the week of 14 September 2009 in Melbourne at the invitation of the Government of Australia. In addition to their individual meetings, the Committees kicked off the week with a joint meeting.

The Joint Committees Meeting provided an opportunity for sharing ideas and information on a number of ongoing GEO processes. Mr Greg Ayers and Ms Sue Barrell of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology opened with an overview of Australian participation in GEO and GEOSS. Participants then discussed the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI), the UIC-CBC Call for Proposals, the GEO Communities of Practice, the GEOSS Portal Usability Tests, the Architecture Implementation Pilots (known as AIP-2 and AIP-3), progress on the Data Sharing Principles, the development of GEOSS Strategic Targets, the Monitoring & Evaluation process, the 2009-2011 GEO Work Plan update, and preparations for the GEO-VI Plenary meeting and the 2010 Ministerial Summit.

Many of the issues raised at the Joint Committee Meeting were further deliberated during the subsequent meetings of the individual Committees and the C4. Presentations from the Joint Committee Meeting are available on the GEO website.

The 10^th Meeting of the Capacity Building Committee (CBC) focused on the first draft of the CBC roadmap. The Roadmap had been prepared several months earlier by a CBC task team, and it recommended a number of changes to the 2009-2011 GEO Work Plan.

The meeting also focused on the implementation of capacity-building tasks and provided an opportunity for participants to share information on Earth observation activities in their respective regions and organisations. A joint session was held with the UIC to discuss progress on the UIC-CBC Call for Proposals.

The CBC roadmap is being developed in response to the revised strategic target on capacity building. The roadmap attempts to provide guidance on what GEO Members and Participating Organisations will need to do to achieve this target by 2015. Although the roadmap document is still being finalized, one of its key recommendations is expected to be the establishment of an Overarching Task focusing on outreach; this has already been reflected in the Work Plan update to be presented to the GEO-VI Plenary. The aim is fill an obvious gap and improve the way the capacity-building Tasks are structured.

The Committee also examined the implementation of GEOSS in Madagascar; the establishment of two EC FP7-funded projects, GEONETCab and SEOCA, as mechanisms for supporting GEO capacity-building tasks; capacity-building activities carried out through GEOSS in the Americas; the UNEP Atlas of Our Changing Environment series (now included as a Task in the GEO Work Plan – see article); Earth observation activities in Southeast Asia; and activities of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Working Group on Education and Training.

All presentation from CBC-10 are available on the GEO website.

The 12th meeting of the User Interface Committee (UIC) took place on 15 and 16 September. The participants discussed the Committee’s plans for the 2009 GEO Plenary, including ideas for the UIC’s Exhibition booth and its presentation to the Plenary. They also considered the 2010 GEO Ministerial Summit, particularly the issue of how to showcase the UIC’s accomplishments and future plans at this major GEO event.

The development of the Communities of Practice (CoPs) was also debated. Presentations were made on the recent activities undertaken by the Carbon Community of Practice and the Coastal Zones Community of Practice. Concrete steps on how to strengthen and foster the integration of existing communities and how to develop new ones were discussed in detail.

The UIC also reviewed the status of Work Plan Task US-09-01a, which aims to identify critical Earth observation priorities by harvesting information on user needs from publicly available documents. The 121 Advisory Group members active in this Task have so far identified 676 documents containing information on Earth observation needs. Preliminary reports for climate, ecosystems, energy, disasters, and weather have been drafted, with final reports expected within a few weeks. For the other four areas (agriculture, biodiversity, health, and water), draft reports are expected shortly followed by the final reports in December 2009/January 2010.

The recent Call for Proposals, which is a joint UIC – CBC effort, attracted 135 submissions of Concept Proposals from 40 different countries. UIC and CBC members were asked to support this effort in several ways, including by serving as project advisors and/or reviewers or by encouraging their organizations to adopt and nurture one or more projects.

The 11^th meeting of the Architecture and Data Committee (ADC) discussed a set of recommendations for the long-term operations of the GEOSS Common Infrastructure, or GCI. (The GCI provides stakeholders in the nine GEO societal benefit areas with information about, and access to, Earth observation datasets, products and services.) These recommendations have been formulated by the GCI Initial Operations Capability Task Force and focus on the sustainability and reconfiguration of the GCI. 

The meeting also addressed how GEOSS architectures could support the GEO Data Sharing Task Force (DSTF) in lowering barriers to data sharing. It proposed technical solutions to support traceability and considered the questionnaire distributed earlier by the DSTF.

A third focus of the meeting was the need to reinforce and expand the ADC’s activities on improving the management of data records. The participants revisited the ADC’s list of global datasets and reviewed the issues of data discovery, access and retrieval, and preservation and dissemination.

Progress reports on 12 architecture- or data-related Work Plan Tasks were presented and reviewed. These Tasks involved improving registry entries and increasing their number, the Call for Participation from the Standards and Interoperability Forum (see article), the completion of the Framework for Quality Assurance for Earth Observation, the release and initial validation of the Global Digital Elevation Map from ASTER data, and other significant advances in the Work Plan.

A final report was provided on the recently completed second Architecture Implementation Pilot, which involved collaboration amongst hundreds of participants from diverse societal benefit areas and from system architecture. The pilot has resulted in many new high-quality and high-priority registry entries and in the testing of new additions to the core architecture of the GCI.

The 11^th meeting of the Science and Technology Committee (STC) reviewed progress on Task ST-09-01 on “Catalyzing Research and Development (R&D) Resources for GEOSS” and Task ST-09-02 on “Promoting Awareness and Benefits of GEO in the Science and Technology Community.” Both of these Tasks are already producing results after being launched with kick-off meetings last July.

To advance Task ST-09-01, the European Space Agency has produced an extensive list of agencies identified as potential resources for furthering R&D and filling gaps identified by GEO, and the STC in particular.

Task ST-09-02 has been advanced through the over 20 action items agreed at the kick-off meeting for completion by early 2010. One of these actions resulted in the recent participation of the GEO Secretariat in the “Future of Satellite Gravity Missions Workshop” held in Graz, Austria (30 September – 2 October). The workshop devised a declaration and roadmap for promoting the continued monitoring of changes in the distribution of the Earth's mass by satellite. This is useful for tracking trends in the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets due to melting, changes in sea levels, and underground water storage. The possibilities for collaboration through GEO generated much interest among the participants, the majority of whom were scientists who, prior to attending the workshop, had not been fully aware of the potential coordination and networking benefits the GEO framework can provide.

In an effort to boost the scientific content of STC meetings, the Melbourne agenda allotted time for three presentations highlighting the science and technology components of various sub-Tasks in the GEO 2009-2011 Work Plan. Dr Andrew Terhorst of CSIRO ICT Centre, Hobart, Tasmania, presented "An update on progress with Task AR-09-02c: Sensor Web Enablement for In-Situ Observing Network Facilitation". Dr Peter Dexter of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and Co-President of JCOMM, gave an update on "Progress with development of a Global Ocean Observing System (CL-09-020)”. Dr Alex Held spoke on “An update on progress with task CL-09-03b: Forest Carbon Tracking.”

In addition, Dr David Halpern provided an overview on the “GEO contribution to the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) through GEO Tasks,” in which he illustrated the constructive interaction that has been taking place between GEO Tasks and GOOS. A keynote address by Dr Albert Van Dijk of CSIRO Land and Water illustrated the work being done in response to the Australian government's mandate to compile and deliver comprehensive water information through his presentation on "An Australian water resources assessment system: integrating hydrological models with on-ground and satellite observations."

Each of the presentations was well-received, and the STC members present unanimously agreed these types of interventions should become a regular feature of each full STC meeting agenda.

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