Principles and Assumptions

This page extracts and sumarises elements from the ELFIE Activity Plan that can be thought of as guiding priciples for this work. Feel free to edit and modify.

ELFIE Principles and assumptions

• A common approach to encoding links between and among environmental domain features which allow cross-domain and cross-system sharing and interoperability of such linked information is possible and desirable

• Existing and pending OGC standards for the encoding of environmental observation data in an integrated dataset of features can be linked according to ReSTful and Linked Data principles

• The ability to encode documents containing links between and among monitoring sites and environmental domain features in a common way will enable automation and lines of inquiry that are not possible without manual intervention today.

• While currently not apparent given existing encodings, implementation standards, and best practices, a reusable approach to encode documents that use these information models in cross-disciplinary applications is doable.

• In order to focus this IE, only environmental domain models concerning landscape interactions with the hydrologic cycle will be considered.

• Focus will be on 1) linked data documents that contain collections of linked features and related observations and 2) feature or observation representation documents that contain links to related features or observations.

• ELFIE will not seek to solve problems regarding network architecture for resolving links or systems design and governance for applications that store and retrieving links or concept relationships.

• Existing ontologies and vocabularies will be used wherever possible.

• Inbound and outbound links - Data providers not responsible to manage inbound links. Data provider only responsible for outbound links

• While “persistence is futile” (corollary to "This too shall pass"), we do our best to build support continuity. Enter into contracts to exchange data