Huerta, Schade, Granell (Eds): Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place. Proceedings of the AGILE'2014 International Conference on Geographic Information Science, Castellón, June, 3-6, 2014. ISBN: 978-90-816960-4-3 1 Introduction and motivation The increasing amount of geospatial data that is available from new and existing sources has inspired numerous businesses, (non-)governmental initiatives and research projects to explore ways to utilize it. The heterogeneity of data sources and diverse processing histories imply issues of syntactic and semantic interoperability. Hence, many research initiatives and projects aim to improve data interoperability. Many tackle the problem with a bottom-up approach by developing proprietary solutions for specific business problems (e.g. Xively 1 , Gigwalk 2 , Jana 3 ), or by developing open-source solutions that allow syntactical (e.g. GDAL 4 , Web 2.0 Broker 5 ), or semantical (e.g. HALE 6 ) translation between concrete data sources, formats and standards. Most of these have a decidedly technical perspective on standards for data formats and data exchange protocols. Others approaches address the problem top-down and aim to develop new standards that facilitate discovery, view and analysis of heterogeneous data sources. The resulting standards address interoperability on a technical level (e.g. OGC 7 , ISO 8 , [9]), on a semantic level (e.g. common vocabularies and code lists, e.g. DublinCore 9 ), but also on a governance and legal level (INSPIRE 10 , ISA 11 ). 1 https://xively.com/ 2 http://gigwalk.com/ 3 http://www.jana.com/ 4 http://www.gdal.org/ 5 http://www.geotec.uji.es/web-2-0-broker-service/ 6 http://www.esdi-community.eu/projects/show/hale 7 http://www.opengeospatial.org/ 8 http://www.isotc211.org/ 9 http://dublincore.org/ 10 http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ These two perspectives have resulted in substantial advances in science and operational systems. Still, all these efforts face the problem of ensuring interoperability among themselves. It is already difficult to keep track of the past and ongoing efforts, let alone to coordinate them. Although mostly adhering to common data exchange standards, the projects and initiatives originate from various academic, administrative or entrepreneurial backgrounds, and thus do not always share ideas of and approaches to interoperability. Furthermore, while opening existing data silos in formerly closed spatial data infrastructures (SDI), new silos are created as part of the process - both vertically (e.g. through incompatible organizations), and horizontally (e.g. through incompatible service buses or middleware). The interoperability issue is aggravated by the fast-moving technological landscape: (1) new opportunities (read: platforms) emerge quickly, while others are abandoned (e.g. Gowalla 12 ) or face an uncertain future (e.g. Foursquare 13 ); (2) many web portals are no longer maintained after funding stopped, but many diverse government portals offers data [3]; (3) out of the numerous citizen science projects (see Sci- Starter 14 and Zooniverse 15 platforms and JRC Citizen Science and Smart Cities 2014 Summit 16 ), many come with proprietary software applications; and (4) initiatives such as INSPIRE move slowly because of the legislative requirements and number of partners involved, and have difficulty adapting 11 http://ec.europa.eu/isa/ 12 http://blog.gowalla.com/ 13 http://www.foursquare.com/ 14 http://scistarter.com/ 15 https://www.zooniverse.org/ 16 http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/DE/derdu-latest-news/sdi- workshops/citizens-science-and-smart-cities-summit.html Multi-sensory Integration for a Digital Earth Nervous System Frank Ostermann University of Twente – ITC, Faculty of Geo- Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) P.O. Box 217 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands f.o.ostermann@utwente.nl Sven Schade European Commission – DG Joint Research Centre (JRC) Via E. Fermi 2749 21027 Ispra, Italy sven.schade@jrc.ec.europa.eu Abstract The amount of geospatial data is increasing, but interoperability issues hinder integrated discovery, view and analysis. This paper suggests an illustrative and extensible solution to some of the underlying challenges, by extending a previously suggested Digital Earth Nervous System with multi-sensory integration capacities. In doing so, it proposes the combination of multiple ways of sensing our environment with a memory for storing relevant data sets and integration methods for extracting valuable information out of the rich inputs. Potential building blocks for the implementation of such an advanced nervous system are sketched and briefly analysed. The paper stimulates more detailed considerations by concluding with challenges for future research and requesting a multidisciplinary development approach – including computer sciences, environmental sciences, cognitive and neurosciences, as well as engineering. Keywords: interoperability, sensing, observation, multi-sensory integration, digital earth.