News

The first ever pedagogical volume devoted to Virtual Observatories (VO) has been accepted for publication by the American Geophysical Union for their Geophysical Monograph Series. VOs are now becoming critical cyberinfrastructure for geoscientists to access and use diverse and ever-growing volumes of data. This volume traces their recent history (virtual observatories were only defined in 2000), and focuses on existing capabilities today and the informatics research and cyberinfrastructure being developed for the near future. The volume also emphasizes the changing role of data providers and the many challenges that VOs face in becoming a part of ongoing effort to build a robust data and information infrastructure.

The volume is being edited by the Science Organizing Committee for the VOiG 2007 meeting along with Charles Barton, head of the eGY international committee. The expected publication date is late 2008. Further details on chapters, authors, availability and pricing will be made available in this newsletter and from the AGU publications department.

Received from pfox@ucar.edu

Informatik 2008 (http://www.informatik2008.de/) will be held in Munich, Germany, on September 8-13, 2008. The meeting will include a workshop on E-Government and Digital Archives which may be of interest to eGY Participants.

The Workshop URL is http://www.hauptstaatsarchiv.hessen.de/egovda.

The deadline for paper submission is April 28. Received from bill.peterson@lasp.colorado.edu.

The Japanese eGY Committee is working with the other international years to organize an important international symposium: "Fifty Years After IGY - Modern Information Technologies and Earth and Solar Sciences," to be held at the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan, on November 10-13, 2008.

The first circular is now available at http://wdc2.kugi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/igy50/index.html. Abstracts will be accepted after the middle of May.

Received from bill.peterson@lasp.colorado.edu

The eGY Working Group on Best Practices has opened a website site for professional data managers to exchange information and develop community best practices for data management. Interested eGY participants are encouraged to contribute to the discussions and monitor the site. People interested in contributing to the development of the standards should contact Eric directly via email: eric.a.kihn@noaa.gov.

The site is at: www.sciencedatastewardship.org

Received from eric.a.kihn@noaa.gov.

- Semantic Interoperability, Knowledge and Ontologies

- International Informatics Collaborations

- eGY-Europe

- Earth System Modeling: Strategies and Software (co-listed in CL)

- Data and Metadata Models & Mark-up Languages

- Geosciences applications on Grid

- Grid for Geosciences applications

- The Service Oriented, architecture approach for Earth and Space Sciences

- Visualization Tools and Services

- General System Design, Image Processing and Data Infrastructures

Received from bill.peterson@lasp.colorado.edu

This conference will address discovery, integration, management, and visualization of geoscience data with the goal of improving our understanding of the processes that have shaped the earth and our environment over time. Globalization of geoinformatics based research and education in support of meeting societal challenges will also be a significant theme for the conference. There will be a meeting of eGY Europe held in conjunction with the conference.

Abstracts will be accepted until mid April. Details on the web site: http://gi2008.gfz-potsdam.de/index.php?id=1029 until the end of April.

Received from bill.peterson@lasp.colorado.edu

The 2008 eGY General Meeting was held at the Mesa Laboratories of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, March 5-6, 2008.

The meeting brought together 25 people from the US, Europe, and Africa interested in promoting the ideals outlined in the eGY Declaration (http://www.egy.org/declaration.php). The meeting started with overviews of some recent successes enabled by modern data management practices and an overview of eGY. The rest of the meeting consisted of reports and discussion, outlined below.

In the extensive discussions, attendees developed a list of eGY accomplishments and further actions. These lists will be included in the full report which will soon be available on the eGY web site (www.egy.org).

A meeting of the eGY Africa working group followed the general meeting. A report on that meeting will be in the next newsletter.

Received from bill.peterson@lasp.colorado.edu

"Informatics is what occupies the gap between computer system infrastructures (the hardware, software, grids, and network services) and the superstructure of knowledge producers-research scientists, educators, decision-makers, and so forth." - Alan Bertrand Onestein, 2007. Send your favorite definition of informatics to Peter Fox for a chance to win one of the coveted eGY t-shirts.

Received from charles.barton@anu.edu.au

EOS is about to start running the eGY Spotlight series of news items, reports, articles, and so forth. Contributions will be categorized and treated like any other contribution to EOS, and should be submitted through the normal AGU process. Lead articles have to be arranged by invitation. Spotlight items will be flagged with an eGY logo.

The themes of eGY are data access, data discovery, data release, data preservation, reducing the digital divide, and education and outreach. A central feature of eGY is the promotion of virtual observatories and similar cyber-based systems for providing ready access to data, information, and services. The eGY Spotlight series covers all of these topics as well as broad issues in data science and informatics.

Authors who have agreed to write something are encouraged to proceed. Charlie Barton is keeping track of the contributions, so tell him what you have done, or plan to do. For the list of contributions, email Charlie Barton ( cebarton@gmail.com )or visit www.egy.org > Resources > Working Documents (password protected-ask Bill Peterson ( pete@lasp.colorado.edu ) for the password if needed).

Received from charles.barton@anu.edu.au

eGY is sponsoring session U01: Earth and Space Science Informatics, Developments for the 21st Century at the WPGM. The meeting will be held 29 July to 1 August in Cairns, Australia. Details of the program are available at http://www.agu.org/meetings/wp08. Abstracts are due 16 April. If you have questions about the program, contact one of the conveners: Brian Fraser, Peter Fox, Lesley Wyborn or Charles Barton.

Received from bill.peterson@lasp.colorado.edu