Conclusions and specification for further work Sample Clauses

Conclusions and specification for further work. In conclusion, it can be said that understanding the needs of the end users and having a good overview of existing data sharing tools is essential to the EU BON project in order to address the data sharing needs of the widest community, and to handle the broadest range of data and information within the context of earth observation. We can broadly group the tools into distributed and centralised categories. The distributed ones are being used and managed by the data custodians themselves. The centralised ones are shared repositories not managed by the data custodians, but by an aggregator or publisher. The distinction of tools for sharing and publishing is also important. Data that is shared can still be private and access to it can be controlled. Such access can be revoked. When something is published, it is openly available, and access cannot be revoked anymore. The tools can also be categorised as specialised or general purpose. Specialised tools have built-in support for biodiversity data types and data standards, whereas general purpose tools, e.g. GIS tools and spreadsheets, can deal with more generic data. In this report we have identified so many tools that they cannot possibly all be used or supported by the EU BON project. The purpose of this document is to provide a specification for the work that the EU BON project will be doing with the data sharing tools. Those tools will then be supported, distributed, and used to feed data into the EU BON Portal and to GEOSS. This means that we will have to make choices and action lists. The minimum set of data sharing tools on which the EU BON project focuses is the first named group in each of the above categories. That is, distributed, controllable, and specialised. This limits the choice of tools in those in the table below: GBIF IPT, Morpho/Metacat, and spreadsheet processors. Other tools may still find their place as components of the EU BON Portal where aggregated data can be presented and the data publishing process is being managed. The limitation and possible problem of the approach outlined here is in the word “specialised”. There simply are not distributable data sharing tools specialised for each biodiversity data type (genomic, occurrence, species, habitat, ecosystem, …), but rather only for occurrence and species level data. The question is whether specialised tools are needed at all for each data type. For example, there may actually be potential users for specialised tools for sharing habit...