This repository is a record of activities of the first ELFIE. It has been made public and should be considered read only and available for reference purposes only. All current activities are taking place under the Second ELFIE and potentially other projects.
The ELFIE github.io home page is here: https://opengeospatial.github.io/ELFIE/
The ELFIE is intended to test existing OGC and W3C standards with the goal of establishing a best practice for exposing links between and among environmental domain and sampling features. The IE is focused on two cross-domain use cases: 1) exposing topological and domain feature model relationships between features and 2) description of sampling data available for and linked to sampled domain features While addressing these use cases, the IE will strive to address issues of encoding data as specific views of a linked data graph that would be passed between systems. These linked data graph views are expected to support archictures involving linked data catalogs and registries. For example, data providers can use the linked data graph views as a way to advertise their monitoring or domain features to catalogs or other applications that want to crawl and index available data. Similarly, integrated catalogs that index and construct links between features can use the views as a linked data response to search queries.
- Demonstrate the use of existing and pending OGC standards for the encoding of environmental observation data in an integrated dataset of features linked according to ReSTful and Linked Data principles.
- Prepare an OGC engineering report summarizing the group’s findings with the intention of future development of the relevant policies, best practices or implementation standards.
- Provide draft linked data encodings to be considered by relevant standards working groups.
See the activity plan for more.
Long Term Vision
We think we can eliminate the need for ad-hoc one-off mappings between non-standard feature types with best practices that entail a well known set of semantics and feature models that allow automated traversal and interpretation of linked information.
Specific Near Term Expectations
We think we can express connections between features in an ostensibly open world using existing technologies and data models.
This includes basic spatio-tempoal topological links, monitoring relationships, and domain feature model connections.
We think that use of resources resolved according to a view of a linked data graph will allow us to create documents that could be built from formal linked open data yet are compatible with basic REST/JSON pattern.
Contributions to the ELFIE repository can be made in one of two ways. For users familiar with git and github, contributions can be made through a pull request from a fork of the repository. For users not familiar with git and github, contributions can be made by submitting an issue describing where your contribution can be found and someone will help add the content through a pull request.
See this how-to on setting up your local environment over in the wiki.