[Esip-agclimate] April 5th Cluster Call: Ag and Climate Data, from Field to Repos, Completely FAIR

[Daniel Fuka]

In the last cluster call, Bill and Brian announced they were stepping
back from co-chairing the ACC and that the ACC is going into a
"temporary hiatus", and indeed the cluster under their leadership has
accomplished a lot. With this announcement, some of us have discussed
transitioning from the most recent concept mapping theme to using the
group to bridge several of the existing ESIP Clusters to provide a
full data workflow workbench. Bill and Brian have given us the
blessing to take the ball and run.

A placeholder for this theme that I can offer right now is:
Ag and Climate Data, from Field to Repos, Completely FAIR.

The idea is to do this by symbiotically linking relevant clusters,
starting with a starting point in in-situ data measurement, say the
IoT based sensors currently discussed in the Environmental Sensing
Cluster, and following the data representations of these measurements
though the full data workflow to its final yet least transformed
archive and retrieval architecture.

By full data workflow, consider as an example the push of an electron,
we shall call Frodo, that is created when twisting two different
metals together causing the voltage difference that is measured at one
of several analog channels in a microcontroller, (we can refer to as
Gandolf), which meets up with a geo-coordinate from a GPS, a humidity
driven resistance, and pressure transducer resistance we can refer to
as Sam, Merry, and Pippin respectively. Basically the goals of the
cluster would be determining the best methods to make contact with a
enough Eagles before a bunch of Humans, Orcs, and Elves start making
these simple electrons, resistances, and geohashes into a nonsensical
story that takes 6 books and 4 movies to make any sense of before the
data can be fed back into AI ready architectures... potentially
destroying or allowing the data to fall into the wrong hands along the
way.

I am hoping we would be offering a cross-cluster entity that would not
duplicate, but leverage and complement the work of aligned clusters
ongoing within their respective contexts and around their respective
core interests, and more importantly, to establish workbenches and
sandboxes for us to identify and provide solutions along with
educational platforms for in-situ sensor data workflows.

A potential use case revolves around the recently launched USDA ARS
"Partnerships for Data Innovation" (PDI) which has the mission to
develop and implement a series of sensors and other data-collection,
management, integration, and sharing systems that will help
stakeholders get the most from their limited resources. I have direct
handels into this USDA ARS group, and I believe they would take
interest in our mission.

In our first meeting tomorrow (possibly today) April 5th, it would be
nice for folks who are interested in the workflows of in situ Ag and
Climate sensor data, the semantics and/or ontologies related, and/or
the transport techniques of this data to have an initial discussion of
what would interest them in this full data workflow, as well as to
start an accelerated planning meeting for a workshop centered on the
current state of the ESIP Federation with Sensors and Architecture
examples provided at this summer's ESIP meeting in Pittsburgh, PA.

Thank you for reading this far, and my apologies if you (wrongly)
think Pippin or Merry better represent geolocation than Sam.

dan