Preprints of the Metadiversity Conference Proceedings

  Session 3: The Challenge in Earth Observation, Ecosystem Monitoring, and Environmental Information

The Global Information Locator Service

ELIOT CHRISTIAN, Computer Specialist, U.S. Geological Survey

I am going to talk about the Environment and Natural Resources Management Project of the G8 Global Information Society. You heard this referred to in the prior talk as the "G7"Information Society, but Russia has now been added, at least for the purposes of the Global Information Society itself, making it now "G8."

In 1995, the information technology ministers met together. The idea was to engage in north-south dialogue about what is happening–particularly in terms of sociological impacts–as we move to these new technologies. These are some of the things they said they are going to do:

1. Promote interconnectivity and interoperability
    
2. Develop global markets for networks, services, and applications
    
3. Ensure privacy and data security
    
4. Protect intellectual property rights
    
5. Cooperate in applications research and development
    
6. Monitor social and societal implications

In addition, they decided there should be pilot projects to demonstrate the capabilities of these new technologies and infrastructures. These pilot projects would be organized under 11 themes:

1. Global Inventory
    
2. Global Interoperability for Broadband Networks
    
3. Cross-cultural Education and Training
    
4. Bibliotheca Universalis (Digital Libraries)
    
5. Electronic Museums and Galleries
    
6. Environment and Natural Resources Management
    
7. Global Emergency Management
    
8. Global Healthcare Applications
    
9. Government Online
    
10. Global Marketplace for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises
     
11. Maritime Information Systems

The first one (Global Inventory), headed in Europe, sits on top of the others and provides an inventory of all the pilot-project activity. Others are managed by different people in different nations.

The Environment and Natural Resources Management Project

The one for which the United States is responsible is Environment and Natural Resources Management (ENRM)–number six in the list above. I am co-leader of that project plan. Essentially the idea here is to try to come up with consensus on an international basis–much like we are doing at this meeting–regarding the sort of standards that would have to be in place to create a mechanism for people to find the information of interest, in this case, for environment and natural resources management. In addition, we are to build a prototype of a virtual library of data and information on that topic.

Participants

These are the nations who have been fairly active participants: Australia, Canada, Finland, France, and Germany. International organizations active in our program include the European Commission, the European Space Agency, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the United Nations Environment Program, and, especially, the European Environment Agency.

Project Structure

The G8 group is a politically motivated organization. As a result, the term "expert" doesn't mean what you and I think the term means. Instead, it means a person without a political portfolio, a person who cannot make policy. The term does not ensure that the person really understands the topic that is being considered. However, I would say that everybody in the ENRM group did actually come as "experts," in the way we think of experts. Many of them knew very little about information infrastructure but were knowledgeable in environment or natural resources management.

This–and all of the G8 projects–were specifically time-limited. We are under a mandate to not create new bureaucracies, so we cannot go on forever. As a result, we are now moving toward the twilight of the project. We will have another meeting in January (1999) to pull the final project report together.

Working Groups

Three working groups were set up for the ENRM project. Each group had a different focus.

The Meta-Information Working Group was where we pulled together the people who wanted to talk in technical terms about these topics. The European Commission and the European Environment Agency headed that working group. The group had to determine how to come to consensus on standards so it could create a model for this information technology piece. We adopted as a model the work that had started in the global change community, working through a group called the Interagency Working Group on Data Management for Global Change, or IWGDMGC (an acronym someone reinterpreted as, "I Wish God Didn't Make Government Committees"). This group advocated the standard that had already gotten fairly wide play–that is, a profile of the Z39.50. My group elaborated a specific usage guideline for the Global Environmental Information Locator Service (GELOS), and it also developed a collections policy. The collections policy, together with the technical standards, determines the basis for deciding if something is in or out of the system.

Climate Change Working Group was the second working group. Led by Switzerland and the Secretariat of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, this group accomplished quite a lot, including:

• coordinating digitization of national communications
   
• exploring its role in promoting "green technologies;"
   
• exploring collaboration with UN agencies that promote Internet access
   
• exploring greater linkages with developing countries, climate change communities, and national focal points
   
• promoting GELOS

The group also promoted the interoperable system that we had built as a demonstration prototype, if you will, of the idea of using common standards.

The Biological Diversity Working Group, the third of the groups, was led by Germany’s Federal Agency for Nature Conservation. This group put together a Web page, began compiling funding sources, worked on common standards, and, again, tested and refined the GELOS server.

The Global Environmental Information Locator Service (GELOS)

Let me talk a little bit more about this prototype–the Global Environmental Information Locator Service. This prototype was developed primarily by the European Commission’s Center for Earth Observation, in Italy. The records that are included in this GELOS system describe many types of information resources. For example, you have calendar entries about upcoming events. You have entries about experts. You have entries about remote databases that are accessible. All of these entries are commonly searchable, based on the set of Z39.50 standard entries attributes. So, for example, you can search using a "title." It may be the title of a meeting. Or, it may be the title of a book. The system will recognize all things that are titles.

The Biological Diversity Working Group also focused on defining the semantics of the underlying system. You can put many different user interfaces on top of this–or maybe the users get to design their own interfaces (there are many that have been built in this way as well). As noted earlier, the primary capability is for people to register data sets or themselves as experts or themselves as people who want to be notified when things happen, and so on.

GELOS searches can be done by geographic location, by keyword, by free text, or by a combination of these criteria. In addition, you can fan out this search, if you will, distribute it out over the Internet to a wide variety of other databases. The ability to conduct such a distributed search is made possible by our use of a common standard, Z39.50. Z39.50, used with a profile like GILS (Global Information Locator Service, a.k.a., Government Information Locator Service) or FGDC’s Geospatial Profile, is what makes this all hang together. I have a list of things you can get to with this standard–about 700 different resources. One is the FGDC Clearing House, which in turn points to over 90 different resources that are searched. Another pointer is to CIESIN, which, again, uses the same Z39.50 standard and fans out to around 20 different countries. There also is a supersearch available on GELOS.

Looking to the Future

As I said before, the G8’s work on the Global Information Locator Service is being wrapped up. We are looking to move sponsorship to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). So far, the UNEP is very positive about this possibility. However, its recurring question is, "You mean we really don't have to spend any of our money to do this?" But that was the way we operated under the G7. These are just participating nations contributing what they will. There has been no funding for this. It is just the nations sending people, and, in our case, the European Commission in particular putting out resources to build the software. Thus, this has been a grass-roots effort.

The Global Information Locator Service (GILS)–An Analog

The thing that was adopted by the G8 was a search interface–not a user interface, not a records format, not a database scheme, not a common piece of software. It was this notion of a common service for searching. That search interface is GILS.

I would like to talk a little bit more about Global Information Locator Service (GILS), for I know there is a lot of misunderstanding about it. If you walk up to a help desk, there is somebody there to answer questions. GILS is sort of a help desk. It is a service that says, "You can talk to me about the following things: I know people's names, I know their addresses, and I know their expertise." So we have a vocabulary that we both understand. You can say, for example, "I am looking for somebody who is an expert in biodiversity and I would like his name and phone number because I want to contact him." The help desk attendant then supplies an appropriate name and phone number. That is what GILS does.

In order to have this conversation in the first place, we both have to be talking the same language, such as English. That is what Z39.50 does. It gets us to the point where we are talking the same language. Then GILS says, "Oh, since we have a vocabulary. I know what you mean when you ask about names, addresses, and subject expertise."

We have heard it said that some things have GILS records in them. But there is no such thing as a GILS record. GILS is the search interface. It says, "You can talk to me about these things," and it writes down the answer for the user. It has delivered something to the user in the context the user requested.

Let's stop for a moment and look behind the help desk window. What are those helpers really doing? In the material world, the people at the help desk have a bunch of books on the shelf, where they can find the name. But they might have to go over to a professional society to find additional information requested. In fact, if you really look behind the scenes, you find out that there is no such thing as a record that will supply all the information requested.

But you as a user really don't care how the helper–be it a human or a search engine–finds the answers to your question. As a user you just are asking your question to an interface. The fact that it uses a DIF, for example, doesn't matter to you. In fact, the search interface of the Global Change Master Directory is GILS-compliant. CIESIN is GILS-compliant. As a user, you don't need to care. You wouldn't know. It is hidden from you.

An even better example is that there are services that are really just referrals. So if you ask to see their databases, they have none. Instead, when you ask a question, they decide who would know the answer to the question, and only at that point in time do they actually develop any data. But again, at the interface level, it really doesn't matter to the user what’s going on behind the scene.

So the point of GILS is, if we could just have people all agree on a common search service, everyone could have any user interface they want for their own system. It could be for kids in the Globe Program. It could be for professionals. That is why we say GILS is just a search interface, but it happens to be a very good one. That is why we adopted it for GELOS. It could also serve as a general standard to assure interoperability in other types of systems.

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