Search

Presence is a palpable sense of space, things and others that overlaps with matters of meaning, yet is not reducible to it: it is a dimension of things that hides in plain sight. This paper is motivated by observations that (1) presence is under-appreciated in questions of modern and nascent human-synthetic agent interaction, and (2) that presence matters because it affects and moves us. The paper’s goal is to articulate a multi-faceted understanding of presence, and why it matters, so the importance of presence may be readily understood by those who regulate media, digital and artificial intelligence (AI) industries. Novel forms of presence raise all sorts of questions of what it means to live with new forms of presences. Some of these are highly positive and others are resistant to simplistic moral diagnosis, a point explored through extended consideration of ‘thanatechnology’ and ‘ghostbots’. To clarify and foreground presence, this paper draws on continental philosophy and technologist ideas about presence to understand the significance and parameters of presence. It then puts these to work by considering a range of existing and emerging human-synthetic agent interactions, arguing that that presence is an underappreciated yet crucial factor in human-synthetic interactions, particularly involving AI and ghostbots. The paper concludes with points of focus for organisations charged with media, data protection and AI governance regarding facets of presence-based characteristics for emergent human-synthetic interaction. Foremost is consideration of open standards for a presence-based afterlife and suggestion of a temporal firewall, or a break of time before resurrection, to prevent harm to those who have recently lost someone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increasing relevance of Open Science (OS) in the European research landscape, very few publications have addressed the analysis of its role within the European rail context. To this effect, the present paper aims at contributing to shed light on the topic by setting the cornerstone for a differentiated analysis of OS in this sector. In order to do so, the analysis is divided into 2 main sections. The 1st provides an overview of initiatives and experiences regarding OS, which have been recently carried out in the sector. The analysis of initiatives and scientific publications has shown that Open Data (OD) is the area attracting more attention and with more potential for expansion mainly due to the commercial interest of the data. As expected, the use of Open Tools (OT) is common but, interestingly, a growing interest in the development of OT in the sector has been detected. The creation of Open Standards (OSt), developed by specific rail stakeholders’ groups or by coalitions of different stakeholders is increasing in the last years. Amongst the OS areas analysed, Open Access (OA) and Citizen Science (CS) have shown less progress. However, tendencies toward an increasing interest in these areas within the sector has been also detected. The 2nd section aims to uncover the issues or barriers preventing a wider spread of OS specifically in the rail sector and suggest regulatory avenues and actions to overcome them. The identified issues revolve around 3 topics: the lack of initiative on behalf of the European Union (EU) to a) engage other stakeholders beyond the field of research, and b) leverage untapped OS potential in sector-specific situations, which could contribute to its development; and finally, the absence of a sector-specific OS framework. The establishment of such a framework could have a significant positive impact in OD, which is the most appealing area and thus contributing to the uptake of OS as a whole in the sector. In view of such issues, the present paper suggests the establishment of: (1) a European Rail Open Science Policy Platform in order to create a forum-like space in which to align the stakeholder’s positions, and (2) a Joint Rail Data Action Plan to design an OS governance framework, with the aim to ensure the usability, quality, and reliability of data. After identifying the state of OS in the rail sector and the uncovering of several issues that are hindering its development, this paper concludes that the constant further monitoring with regards to needs, challenges and interests (or lack of such) of the different rail stakeholders is key to ensure the continuous development of OS.

Despite the increasing relevance of Open Science (OS) in the European research landscape, very few publications have addressed the analysis of its role within the European rail context. To this effect, the present paper aims at contributing to shed light on the topic by setting the cornerstone for a differentiated analysis of OS in this sector. In order to do so, the analysis is divided into 2 main sections. The 1st provides an overview of initiatives and experiences regarding OS, which have been recently carried out in the sector. The analysis of initiatives and scientific publications has shown that Open Data (OD) is the area attracting more attention and with more potential for expansion mainly due to the commercial interest of the data. As expected, the use of Open Tools (OT) is common but, interestingly, a growing interest in the development of OT in the sector has been detected. The creation of Open Standards (OSt), developed by specific rail stakeholders' groups or by coalitions of different stakeholders is increasing in the last years. Amongst the OS areas analysed, Open Access (OA) and Citizen Science (CS) have shown less progress. However, tendencies toward an increasing interest in these areas within the sector has been also detected. The 2nd section aims to uncover the issues or barriers preventing a wider spread of OS specifically in the rail sector and suggest regulatory avenues and actions to overcome them. The identified issues revolve around 3 topics: the lack of initiative on behalf of the European Union (EU) to a) engage other stakeholders beyond the field of research, and b) leverage untapped OS potential in sector-specific situations, which could contribute to its development; and finally, the absence of a sector-specific OS framework. The establishment of such a framework could have a significant positive impact in OD, which is the most appealing area and thus contributing to the uptake of OS as a whole in the sector. In view of such issues, the present paper suggests the establishment of: (1) a European Rail Open Science Policy Platform in order to create a forum-like space in which to align the stakeholder's positions, and (2) a Joint Rail Data Action Plan to design an OS governance framework, with the aim to ensure the usability, quality, and reliability of data. After identifying the state of OS in the rail sector and the uncovering of several issues that are hindering its development, this paper concludes that the constant further monitoring with regards to needs, challenges and interests (or lack of such) of the different rail stakeholders is key to ensure the continuous development of OS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this manuscript, we describe the soft- and hardware architecture as well as the implementation of a modern Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) system for sensor-assisted telepsychotherapy. It enables telepsychotherapy sessions in which the patient exercises therapy-relevant behaviors in their home environment under the remote supervision of the therapist. Wearable sensor information (electrocardiogram (ECG), movement sensors, and eye tracking) is streamed in real time to the therapist to deliver objective information about specific behavior-triggering situations and the stress level of the patients. We describe the IT infrastructure of the system which uses open standards such as WebRTC and OpenID Connect (OIDC). We also describe the system's security concept, its container-based deployment, and demonstrate performance analyses. The system is used in the ongoing study SSTeP-KiZ (smart sensor technology in telepsychotherapy for children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder) and shows sufficient technical performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of how animal culture can aid the conservation crisis are burgeoning. As scientists and conservationists working to protect endangered species, we call for reflection on how the culture concept may be applied in practice. Here, we discuss both the potential benefits and potential shortcomings of applying the animal culture concept, and propose a set of achievable milestones that will help guide and ensure its effective integration existing conservation frameworks, such as Adaptive Management cycles or Open Standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technology improves reliability, innovation, and efficiency in the medical care sector by assisting in coming up with electronic health records. Looking into the interoperability of software and databases is relevant from the perspective of electronic health records. The standardization of processes in the European Union and the United States is diverse, which makes it all the more important to discuss open standards. Software systems create patient-centric medical care services and a platform for management. Thus, they facilitate the formation of functional health information networks and the exchange of information. Therefore, this improves the value proposition for all stakeholders involved. Open-source standards have been found to be developed independently of any single party. They do not have any legal or technical closest that prevent any party to use them. Similarly, they do not have extensions or components with a dependency or being based on preparation standards. Additionally, they are available for full public assessment without any form of constraints. This paper discusses these open standards and how best they have been deployed in the United States and the European Union - understanding that advantages and disadvantages of open standards are also imperative.

Scientific innovation is increasingly reliant on data and computational resources. Much of today’s life science research involves generating, processing, and reusing heterogeneous datasets that are growing exponentially in size. Demand for technical experts (data scientists and bioinformaticians) to process these data is at an all-time high, but these are not typically trained in good data management practices. That said, we have come a long way in the last decade, with funders, publishers, and researchers themselves making the case for open, interoperable data as a key component of an open science philosophy. In response, recognition of the FAIR Principles (that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) has become commonplace. However, both technical and cultural challenges for the implementation of these principles still exist when storing, managing, analysing and disseminating both legacy and new data. COPO is a computational system that attempts to address some of these challenges by enabling scientists to describe their research objects (raw or processed data, publications, samples, images, etc.) using community-sanctioned metadata sets and vocabularies, and then use public or institutional repositories to share them with the wider scientific community. COPO encourages data generators to adhere to appropriate metadata standards when publishing research objects, using semantic terms to add meaning to them and specify relationships between them. This allows data consumers, be they people or machines, to find, aggregate, and analyse data which would otherwise be private or invisible, building upon existing standards to push the state of the art in scientific data dissemination whilst minimising the burden of data publication and sharing.

While the IoT deployments multiply in a wide variety of verticals, the most IoT devices lack a built-in secure firmware update mechanism. Without such a mechanism, however, critical security vulnerabilities cannot be fixed, and the IoT devices can become a permanent liability, as demonstrated by recent large-scale attacks. In this paper, we survey open standards and open source libraries that provide useful building blocks for secure firmware updates for the constrained IoT devices-by which we mean low-power, microcontroller-based devices such as networked sensors/actuators with a small amount of memory, among other constraints. We design and implement a prototype that leverages these building blocks and assess the security properties of this prototype. We present experimental results including first experiments with SUIT, a new IETF standard for secure IoT firmware updates. We evaluate the performance of our implementation on a variety of commercial off-the-shelf constrained IoT devices. We conclude that it is possible to create a secure, standards-compliant firmware update solution that uses the state-of-the-art security for the IoT devices with less than 32 kB of RAM and 128 kB of flash memory.

In computing, an open platform describes a software system which is based on open standards, such as published and fully documented external application programming interfaces (API) that allow using the software to function in other ways than the original programmer intended, without requiring modification of the source code. Using these interfaces, a third party could integrate with the platform to add functionality. An open platform implies that the vendor allows, and perhaps supports, the ability to do this. Using an open platform a developer could add features or functionality that the platform vendor had not completed or had not conceived of. An open platform allows the developer to change existing functionality, as the specifications are publicly available open standards. A service-oriented architecture allows applications, running as services, to be accessed in a distributed computing environment, such as between multiple systems or across the Internet. A major focus of Web services is to make functional building blocks accessible over standard Internet protocols that are independent from platforms and programming languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open geospatial data and tools are an increasingly important paradigm offering the opportunity to promote the democratization of geographical information, the transparency of governments and institutions, as well as social, economic and environmental opportunities. During the past decade, developments in the area of open geospatial data and open-source geospatial software have greatly improved. Many parts of the research community believe that combining free and open software, open data, as well as open standards, leads to the creation of a sustainable ecosystem to accelerate new discoveries to help solve global cross-disciplinary societal challenges, from climate change mitigation to sustainable cities. The consistent prevalence of open source GIS studies motivated this thematic collection. The contributions are divided into two main categories. In the first category, seven concrete studies on open-source tools and technologies for urban and environmental studies are briefly presented. Each one has been implemented for and applied to a certain use case, and at the same time it may be applied to other use cases due to the reproducibility nature of open source software. The second category presents and discusses the usability of open source geospatial solutions for laser scanning technology and its applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of sharing of data has become easier than ever with the advancement of cloud computing and software tools. However, big challenges remain such as efficient handling of big geospatial data, supporting and sharing of crowd sourced/citizen science data, integration with semantic heterogeneity, and inclusion of agile processes for continuous improvement of geospatial technology. This paper discusses the new frontiers regarding these challenges and the related work performed by the Open Geospatial Consortium, the world leading organization focused on developing open geospatial standards that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless, and location-based services and mainstream IT.

As the automotive industry steers towards electromobility and electric vehicle adoption surges, Brazil and other Latin-American countries remain laggards. The Brazilian scenario exhibits unique features, such as a powerful automotive sector with large investments in internal combustion engine technology and a well-established biofuels market based on flex-fuel technology. Although energy security, urban air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, and technological advantage have been common drivers for the adoption of electric vehicles worldwide, the Brazilian immediate motivations are different, and the biofuels business ecosystem is likely to transform the path for electromobility. High tag price and public charging infrastructure absence have deeply discouraged electric vehicles adoption. A lack of regulation and a national consensus about the role of electric vehicles have been notorious. In fact, only in 2018 did the electricity regulatory agency (ANEEL) issue a resolution permitting the sale of electricity for recharging. The objective of this review was to create an outlook of the Brazilian transportation landscape. We identified relevant players, public charging infrastructure initiatives, market and other barriers, and regulation actions by consulting academic literature, media sources, and reports. We do not claim to predict the evolution of electrification. Instead, we aim to consolidate the information which can be used for decision support or strategy definition among entrepreneurs or policymakers. The main findings here are the necessity of a model for electrification able to create a synergy with biofuels and the urgency of having well-defined policies on what Brazil wants from electromobility.

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is mainly associated with vertically integrated systems that often are closed and fragmented in their applicability. To build a better IoT ecosystem, the open IoT platform has become a popular term in the recent years. However, this term is usually used in an intuitive way without clarifying the openness aspects of the platforms. The goal of this paper is to characterize the openness types of IoT platforms and investigate what makes them open. We conducted a systematic mapping study by retrieving data from 718 papers. As a result of applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 221 papers were selected for review. We discovered 46 IoT platforms that have been characterized as open, whereas 25 platforms are referred as open by some studies rather than the platforms themselves. We found that the most widely accepted and used open IoT platforms are NodeMCU and ThingSpeak that together hold a share of more than 70% of the declared open IoT platforms in the selected papers. The openness of an IoT platform is interpreted into different openness types. Our study results show that the most common openness type encountered in open IoT platforms is open-source, but also open standards, open APIs, open data and open layers are used in the literature. Finally, we propose a new perspective on how to define openness in the context of IoT platforms by providing several insights from the different stakeholder viewpoints.

The current cities’ urban challenges go through digitalization and integration of new technologies under the perspective of actual and future ecological, as well as socio-economic commitments. This process is translated into the Open Standardized Urban Data Platform, which plays a pivotal role. Within its main functionalities, data ingestion, analytics and services as vertical domains become necessary to create more environmentally friendly cities. However, there still exist some deficits. Among them, openness and interoperability are outlined. On the one hand, there is a lack of open data initiatives for increasing the smart services stock. On the other hand, interoperability depends upon vendors and integrators, reducing the possibilities of Smart City growth. In this context, under the mySMARTLife project (GA #731297) umbrella, an Open Specifications Framework has been developed in order to address four main issues: (1) data interoperability; (2) services or verticals interoperability; (3) openness; and (4) replicability. It enlightens the implementation and integration of multiple city domains (like infrastructures, mobility, energy, buildings) for smart management and big-data analytics. Its applicability is demonstrated in the three lighthouse cities of the project, Nantes (France), Hamburg (Germany) and Helsinki (Finland).

Information technology improves reliability, innovation, and efficiency in the medical care sector by assisting in coming up with electronic health records. Looking into the interoperability of software and databases is relevant from the perspective of electronic health records. The standardization of processes in the European Union and the United States is diverse, which makes it all the more important to discuss open standards. Software systems create patient-centric medical care services and a platform for management. Thus, they facilitate the formation of functional health information networks and the exchange of information. Therefore, this improves the value proposition for all stakeholders involved. Open-source standards have been found to be developed independently of any single party. They do not have any legal or technical closest that prevent any party to use them. Similarly, they do not have extensions or components with a dependency or being based on preparation standards. Additionally, they are available for full public assessment without any form of constraints. This paper discusses these open standards and how best they have been deployed in the United States and the European Union -- understanding that advantages and disadvantages of open standards are also imperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The built environment provides significant opportunities for IoT (Internet of Things) deployment, and can be singled out as one of the most important aspects for IoT related research. While the IoT deployment in the built environment is growing exponentially, there exists a gap in integrating these two in a systematic way through open standards and systems. From technological perspective, there is a need for convergence of diverse fields ranging from Building Information Systems and Building Services to Building Automation Systems, and IoT devices and finally the end user services to develop smart, user oriented applications. This paper outlines the efforts to develop a platform that integrates the built environment data with IoT sensors in a campus wide, web based system called Otaniemi3D that provides information about energy usage, occupancy and user comfort by integrating Building Information Models and IoT devices through open messaging standards (O-MI and O-DF) and IFC models. The paper describes the design criteria, the system architecture, the workflow and a proof of concept with potential use cases that integrate IoT with the built environment. Initial results show that both the end users and other research groups can benefit from such platforms by either consuming the data in their daily life or using the data for more advance research. Highlights • It is Important to integrate built environment data with internet of things (IoT). • A framework using open standards is proposed to tackle this. • A proof of concept built on the framework is provided. • A real-life use case demonstrate the usefulness of the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fog computing paradigm is emerging after a decade's dominance of cloud‐based system design and architecture. Now, instead of centralising the computation and coordination to remote services, these are deployed and distributed to all over physical surroundings and network nodes, including cloud services, smart gateways, and network edge devices. At the moment, the majority of the Internet of things (IoT) systems and software has built on top of open Web‐based technologies. The authors assume that with the ever‐growing number and heterogeneity of connected devices, it becomes ever‐more crucial to have open standards that support interoperability and enable interactions. They review the current technological space for architecting Web technology‐based IoT software in the coming era of fog computing. They focus on fundamental research challenges and discuss the emerging issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite most Spatial Data Infrastructures offering service-based visualization of geospatial data, requirements are often at a very basic level leading to poor quality of maps. This is a general observation for any geospatial architecture as soon as open standards as those of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are applied. To improve the situation, this paper does focus on improvements at the portrayal interoperability side by considering standardization aspects. We propose two major redesign recommendations. First to consolidate the cartographic theory at the core of the OGC Symbology Encoding standard. Secondly to build the standard in a modular way so as to be ready to be extended with upcoming future cartographic requirements. Thus, we start by defining portrayal interoperability by means of typical-use cases that frame the concept of sharing cartography. Then we bring to light the strengths and limits of the relevant open standards to consider in this context. Finally we propose a set of recommendations to overcome the limits so as to make these use cases a true reality. Even if the definition of a cartographic-oriented standard is not able to act as a complete cartographic design framework by itself, we argue that pushing forward the standardization work dedicated to cartography is a way to share and disseminate good practices and finally to improve the quality of the visualizations.

The aim of this paper is to present a proposal for a national building standard in Sweden. We define requirements for the proposed standard, e.g., it should support development of 3D city models, connect to building information models (BIM) and national registers and be based on a national classification system for the urban environment. Based on these requirements we develop an Application Domain Extension (ADE) of the building model in the proposed CityGML 3.0 standard denoted CityGML Sve-Test. CityGML 3.0 includes several new features of interest, e.g., the space concept, enhanced possibilities to convert data, and to link to other standards. In our study we create test data according to CityGML Sve-Test and evaluate it against the requirements. It is shown that BIM models (in Industry Foundation Classes, IFC, format) can be converted to CityGML Sve-Test and that a classification system facilitates this conversion. The CityGML Sve-Test dataset can be used to increase the automation level in building permissions checking and a related study shows that CityGML 3.0 has capabilities to link to legal information and be a base for 3D cadastral index maps. Based on our experience, we suggest that the national building standard should conform to international standards and, if possible, include a classification system. The exchange format (GML, JSON etc.) might change, but to be based on a standardized data model ensures harmonized structures and concepts.

The building information modeling - BIM is a technology developed toward creation of computer based information model that encompasses whole building lifecycle. Toward that goal a number of information technology standards have been developed that enable different professions in AEC to cooperatively develop electronic building model. The paper gives overview of essential technologies, discusses their intended purpose, and gives outline of the currently achieved functionality.

The process of sharing of data has become easier than ever with the advancement of cloud computing and software tools. However, big challenges remain such as efficient handling of big geospatial data, supporting and sharing of crowd sourced/citizen science data, integration with semantic heterogeneity, and inclusion of agile processes for continuous improvement of geospatial technology. This paper discusses the new frontiers regarding these challenges and the related work performed by the Open Geospatial Consortium, the world leading organization focused on developing open geospatial standards that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless, and location-based services and mainstream IT. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: Scientific workflows have been commonly used in geospatial data analysis and Cyberinfrastructure. They allow distributed geoprocessing algorithms, models, data, and sensors to be chained together to support geospatial data analysis, and environmental monitoring, and integrated environmental modelling. Results: This paper presents an open source geoprocessing workflow tool, GeoJModelBuilder. It leverages open standards, Sensor Web, geoprocessing commands and services, OpenMI-compliant models together. Conclusion: The implementation provides a flexible, reusable, interoperable, and user-friendly way for geoprocessing in an open environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open standardization seems to be very popular among software developers as it simplifies the standard's adoption by the software engineering. Formal specification methods, while very promising, are being adopted slowly as the industry seems to have little motivation to move into this territory. In this paper the authors present (1) the idea of applying formal specification techniques to open standards' specifications, and (2) an example of a formal specification of the Rich Site Summary (RSS) v2.0 open standard. The authors provide evidence for the advantages of the open standards formal specification over natural language documentations: formal specifications are more concise, less ambiguous, more complete with respect to the original documentation and, when using certain kinds of specification languages, executable and reusable as they support module inheritance. The merging of formal specification methods and open standards allows (1) a more concrete standard design; (2) an improved understanding of the environment under design; (3) an enforced certain level of precision into the specification, and also (4) provides software engineers with extended property checking/verification capabilities, especially if they opt to use any algebraic specification language. The authors showcase how the RSS standard can be formally specified using an algebraic specification language and demonstrate how can that be beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The escalating illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is one of the most high-profile conservation challenges today. The crisis has attracted over US$350 million in donor and government funding in recent years, primarily directed at increased enforcement. There is growing recognition among practitioners and policy makers of the need to engage rural communities that neighbor or live with wildlife as key partners in tackling IWT. However, a framework to guide such community engagement is lacking. We developed a theory of change (ToC) to guide policy makers, donors, and practitioners in partnering with communities to combat IWT. We identified 4 pathways for community-level actions: strengthen disincentives for illegal behavior, increase incentives for wildlife stewardship, decrease costs of living with wildlife, and support livelihoods that are not related to wildlife. To succeed the pathways, all require strengthening of enabling conditions, including capacity building, and of governance. Our ToC serves to guide actions to tackle IWT and to inform the evaluation of policies. Moreover, it can be used to foster dialogue among IWT stakeholders, from local communities to governments and international donors, to develop a more effective, holistic, and sustainable community-based response to the IWT crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georeferenced 3D models represent an increasingly accepted solution for storing and displaying information at urban scale. CityGML, as standard data model for the representation, storage and exchange of 3D city models, represent a very attractive solution which combines 3D geometric and semantic information in a single data model. In this paper we present an approach to visualize semantic and 3D information of historical centers using open standards. Also, three client applications are presented targeting different agents with different needs with the characteristic that all the information is got from an unique extended CityGML data model.

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term “envirofied” Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management).

Open Source Software is receiving an increasing attention in the public administration. The aim of the paper is to discuss the deployment of open source software for office automation and to present a synthesis of the up to date status. It is intended to sensitize provosts and policy makers regarding the value and benefits of open standards in public administration. The article explains why anyone would choose an open standard format for office documents, instead of the obsolete binary formats. The responsibility of the public sector to protect the permanently, open and free access to public documents is emphasized. Switching the IT systems to open source and open standards can solve the problems with significant financial benefits. One available open source software solution in the field, the Open Office suite, is presented as a viable and free alternative to commercial products. The article reviews next the existent competing open standards - OpenDocument and OpenXML. Finally, the measures and efforts implied to make a non invasive migration to open technologies are presented.

The paper takes as a starting point a recent EU Commission report on scientific publishing in Europe (Dewatripont et al 2006). In Norway, where a new system of documentation of scientific publishing was introduced in 2005, several of the recommendations in this report have already been anticipated. The Norwegian documentation system which has already proven controversial in parts of the research community and lacks parallells in other Nordic countries like Denmark and Sweden, is expected to have considerable consequences on Norwegian publishing patterns, such as increased use of electronic journals and of open standards such as Open Access and Open Source (Vaagan 2005). As e-publishing grows as part of the process of globalization, there is increasing awareness in many countries of ethical concerns in science and in scientific publishing, including the need for public access to publicly-funded research results. In this perspective, the paper links open standards in scientific communication and publishing to the principle of universality of science and to information ethics priorities identified by Capurro (2004). Qualitative methodology is used with critical & typical case sampling (Patton 2002) of key policy documents as well as international articles on e-publishing 2000-2005, especially from DLib magazine. In conclusion, it is suggested that open standards such as Open Access and Open Source are likely to increase in scientific publishing in the future, both in Norway and in the EU.

While many governments are now committed to release Open Government Data under non-proprietary standardized formats, less attention has been given to the actual consequences of these standards for knowledge workers. Unpacking the history of three open data standards (CSV, GTFS, IATI), this paper shows what is actually happening when these standards are enacted in the work practices of bureaucracies. It is built on participant-observer enquiry and interviews focussed on the back rooms of open data, and looking specifically at the invisible work necessary to construct open datasets. It shows that the adoption of open standards is increasingly becoming an indicator of the advancement of open data programmes. Enacting open standards involves much more than simple technical operations, it operates a quiet and localised transformation of bureaucracies, in which the decisions of data workers have substantive consequences for how the open government data and transparency agendas are performed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last years, important research investments have been made by Airbus Group Innovations for the establishment of sustainable Product and Process data interoperability based on open standards. Driven successively by concurrent engineering, collaborative product design in the virtual enterprise or digital behavorial aircraft, it was capitalize through the establishment of a federative interoperability framework. Driven by factory of the future-related research, the dynamic manufacturing network (DMN) concept enriched the framework, which aims at providing agile infrastructure for networked collaborative product development. For such networks, protocols based on open eBusiness product lifecycle management (PLM) standards for exchange and sharing of product and process data between the implied organizations, their processes and the technical enteprise applications supporting these processes are needed This paper presents a new way of combining model-based enterprise platform engineering, model-driven architecture, and system engineering in order to adress the establishment of a sustainable interoperability within DMN. Based on relevant litterature interoperability issues, this paper describes the new approach, which relies on the association of effective existing technologies coupled with research results on the fields of model-driven engineering (MDE), enterprise interoperability, system engineering and PLM. The new approach relies on the concept of digital factory system (DFS) coupled with DMN in order to produce sustainable and agile collaborative infrastructure for manufacturing digital ebusiness ecosystem. The approach is then illustrated through use case coming from the IMAGINE project and an outline is provided on how it will be used and developed further for the assessment of PLM standards and their implementation in the Standard Interoperability PLM project at IRT-Systemx. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The necessity of open standards for effective sharing and use of remote sensing continues to receive increasing emphasis in policies of agencies and projects around the world. Coordination on the development of open standards for geospatial information is a vital step to insure that the technical standards are ready to support the policy objectives. The mission of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is to advance development and use of international standards and supporting services that promote geospatial interoperability. To accomplish this mission, OGC serves as the global forum for the collaboration of geospatial data / solution providers and users. Photogrammetry and remote sensing are sources of the largest and most complex geospatial information. Some of the most mature OGC standards for remote sensing include the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards, the Web Coverage Service (WCS) suite of standards, encodings such as NetCDF, GMLJP2 and GeoPackage, and the soon to be approved Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) standard. In collaboration with ISPRS, OGC working with government, research and industrial organizations continue to advance the state of geospatial standards for full use of photogrammetry and remote sensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Information exchange is essential for transitioning high-quality care between care settings. Inadequate or delayed information exchange can result in medication errors, missed test results, considerable delays in care, and even readmissions. Unfortunately, long-term and postacute care facilities often lag behind other health care facilities in adopting health information technologies, increasing difficulty in facilitating care transitions through electronic information exchange. The research gap is most evident when considering the implications of the inability to electronically transfer patients' health records between these facilities., Objective: This study aimed to design and evaluate an open standards-based interoperability solution that facilitates seamless bidirectional information exchange between acute care and long-term and postacute care facilities using 2 vendor electronic health record (EHR) systems., Methods: Using the design science research methodology, we designed an interoperability solution that improves the bidirectional information exchange between acute care and long-term care (LTC) facilities using different EHR systems. Different approaches were applied in the study with a focus on the relevance cycle, including eliciting detailed requirements from stakeholders in the health system who understand the complex data formats, constraints, and workflows associated with transferring patient records between 2 different EHR systems. We performed literature reviews and sought experts in the health care industry from different organizations with a focus on the rigor cycle to identify the components relevant to the interoperability solution. The design cycle focused on iterating between the core activities of implementing and evaluating the proposed artifact. The artifact was evaluated at a health care organization with a combined footprint of acute and postacute care operations using 2 different EHR systems., Results: The resulting interoperability solution offered integrations with source systems and was proven to facilitate bidirectional information exchange for patients transferring between an acute care facility using an Epic EHR system and an LTC facility using a PointClickCare EHR system. This solution serves as a proof of concept for bidirectional data exchange between Epic and PointClickCare for medications, yet the solution is designed to expand to additional data elements such as allergies, problem lists, and diagnoses., Conclusions: Historically, the interoperability topic has centered on hospital-to-hospital data exchange, making it more challenging to evaluate the efficacy of data exchange between other care settings. In acute and LTC settings, there are differences in patients' needs and delivery of care workflows that are distinctly unique. In addition, the health care system's components that offer long-term and acute care in the United States have evolved independently and separately. This study demonstrates that the interoperability solution improves the information exchange between acute and LTC facilities by simplifying data transfer, eliminating manual processes, and reducing data discrepancies using a design science research methodology., (©Madhu Gottumukkala. Originally published in JMIR Formative Research (https://formative.jmir.org), 17.02.2023.)

UAVs are a disruptive technology bringing new geographic data and information to many application domains. UASs are similar to other geographic imagery systems so existing frameworks are applicable. But the diversity of UAVs as platforms along with the diversity of available sensors are presenting challenges in the processing and creation of geospatial products. Efficient processing and dissemination of the data is achieved using software and systems that implement open standards. The challenges identified point to the need for use of existing standards and extending standards. Results from the use of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement set of standards are presented. Next steps in the progress of UAVs and UASs may follow the path of open data, open source and open standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As billions of devices connect to the Internet, a new Web of Things is emerging, with virtual representations of physical or abstract realities increasingly accessible via Web technologies. Achieving a new phase of exponential growth, comparable to the earliest days of the Web, will require open markets, open standards, and the vision to imagine the potential for this expanding WoT. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]