Providing interoperable information for science: utilising INSPIRE to mobilise data from long - term observation sites and protected areas

Providing well documented and interoperable data covering broad geographical areas is needed to analyze the effects of global change on ecosystems. Interoperable data fuel also the data needs of modelling exercises at different scales. High quality, long-term monitoring data are needed for decision making on different scales. Protected areas are an important source of data and information. However, these data are often lacking sufficient metadata and do not have harmonized format. Furthermore, the integration of different metadata levels is important to improve discovery of provided data. This is needed to assess the fitness of use and the atomisation of the analysis processes. The guidelines of the INSPIRE Directive (2007/2/CE) as well as their implementation provide an important starting point for the mobilisation of data on European scale. Our work focuses on the provision of in-situ observation data and the use of INSPIRE EF application scheme to integrate and share information from sites of the Long Term Ecological Research network (LTER), many of which are Protected Areas and are included in the H2020 ECOPOTENTIAL project. The editing of metadata is usually not appreciated by users because it is very time-consuming. In addition, (1) metadata editors are usually not very efficient in terms of interoperability (especially semantic interoperability); (2) metadata are often generated for a specific purpose; and (3) there are different metadata schemes with respect to the domain of research. Within the LTER network and the in-situ component of ECOPOTENTIAL it was decided to adopt the Environmental Monitoring Facility (EMF) for the description of the research sites, Ecological Metadata Language (EML) and ISO19139 for the description of the data, and SensorML for the description of the measuring instruments. The Dynamic Ecological Information Management System - Site and Dataset Registry (DEIMS-SDR) provides metadata on different levels of LTER and ECOPOTENTIAL sites, from the observation location to the single dataset and data streams. This information is dynamically aggregated to EF and transformed to ISO19139 to be able to be exposed through standardised OGC-services. INSPIRE offers a set of common standards for the exchange of information, but it is still lacking implementation in terms of format support by common metadata publishing softwares, e.g. GeoNetwork or pyCSW. The integration of European scale data will be fostered by building on common standards and tools. Development of tools is crucial to ensure the elevation of INSPIRE standards to common standards in the metadata community.