The work of the Constructing a Digital Environment programme draws on the involvement of a wide range of research scientists, students, policy makers and regulators as well as the public. Alongside this, a significant number of written works, reports and communications are also arising from this work. It is considered useful therefore to produce a lexicon of some of the terminology we are encountering, seeking to aid a harmonisation and shared understanding of key terms. In the digital age, the use of controlled vocabularies is also something we should be aware of with the role these play in fostering interoperability. This blog therefore is an evolving listing and definition of some of those key terms, and also a reference to wider sources of information.
First, we recognise and have adapted here some proposed term definitions put forward by the EU Service, EUMETNET, the umbrella organisation for all European Meteorological Services.
Citizen-science data
Information obtained from a group of people who are invited to participate in a data collection process, adding expertise to the data (like it is often done in biology for example). This is data obtained from members of the public with individuals being actively engaged in the data collection process.
ex: user reports See also the definitions of the European Citizen Science Association
Crowdsourced data
Information derived from a group of people without their explicit involvement in the data collection process. This is data obtained from members of the public without them being involved in a specific data collection process.
ex: crowdsourcing app or social media app
Crowdsourced data
Information derived from a group of people without their explicit involvement in the data collection process. This is data obtained from members of the public without them being involved in a specific data collection process.
ex: crowdsourcing app or social media app
Digital Twin
A digital twin is a digital replica of a living or non-living physical entity. The digital twins created in DestinE will give expert and non-expert users tailored access to high-quality information, services, models, scenarios, forecasts and visualisations (e.g. in climate modelling and weather forecasting, hurricane evolution and more). Digital twins rely on the integration of continuous observation, modelling and high performance simulation, resulting in highly accurate predictions of future developments. See https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/destination-earth-destine
FOSS
Free and Open Source – an acronym from the open source movement. FOSS software will typically have a licence model such as Creative Commons.
ex: FOSS-GIS = Free and open source GIS tools
Ontology
A means to formally model the structure of a system, i.e., the relevant entities and relations that emerge from its observation, and which are useful to our purposes (Guarino et al, 2009), whereby “an ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization” (Studer et al., 1998).
Opportunistic data
Information derived from non-meteorological sensors or weather sensitivities. This is data obtained through the re-purposing of existing sensors or systems.
ex: car data, smartphones
Taxonomy
A controlled vocabulary in which all the terms belong to a single hierarchical structure and have parent/child or broader/narrower relationships to other terms. The structure is sometimes referred to as a ‘tree’. The addition of non-preferred terms/synonyms may or may not be part of a taxonomy. See https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/taxonomies
Third party data
Data collected by a third-party organization using meteorological sensors.
ex: Netatmo
Wider sources of definitions
There are a number of other sources of definitions available. Notable amongst which for example is the NASA GCMD (Global Change Master Directory) service, which is trying to achieve some of this standardised controlled vocabulary: See https://earthdata.nasa.gov/earth-observation-data/find-data/gcmd/gcmd-keywords. A broader set of environmental terms is found on the Soil-Net web resource http://www.soil-net.com/dev/page.cfm?pageid=secondary_whatelse_glossary.
If you would like to contribute a term, or have comments on these, please add a comment below.
