The

U.S. Global Change Research Program The United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society. The program began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was codified by ...

(USGCRP) develops and curates the Global Change Information System (GCIS) to establish "data interfaces and interoperable repositories of climate and global change data which can be easily and efficiently accessed, integrated with other data sets, maintained and expanded over time."US Global Change Research Program, 2012. The National Global Change Research Plan 2012–2021: A Strategic Plan for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, 132 pp.
/ref> The initial focus of GCIS is to support the United States Third National Climate Assessment (NCA3), which is to publish reports that enhance the transparency and ability of decision-makers to understand the conclusions and use of the underlying data for their own purposes.

Scope of work

The project scope includes analyzing alterations in climate, land use and land cover, natural resources including water, agriculture and biodiversity, atmospheric composition, chemical composition and ecological systems that may alter the Earth's capacity to sustain life. Global change research includes activities aimed at describing and understanding the interactive physical, chemical and biological processes that regulate the

Earth system Earth system science (ESS) is the application of systems science to the Earth. In particular, it considers interactions and 'feedbacks', through material and energy fluxes, between the Earth's sub-systems' cycles, processes and "spheres"—atmos ...

; the unique environment that the Earth provides for life; changes that are occurring in the Earth system; and the manner in which such systems, environments and changes are influenced by human actions.

Provenance and semantics

GCIS has developed information models and

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...

to represent the content structure of the NCA3 and its associated

provenance Provenance (from the French ''provenir'', 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object. The term was originally mostly used in relation to works of art but is now used in similar senses i ...

information and has been extending its models to incorporate more global change information. Records of objects and relationships within the GCIS are represented in a database for the Semantic Web, which can be queried using the

SPARQL SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle" , a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) is an RDF query language—that is, a semantic query language for databases—able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description F ...

language. GCIS assigns globally unique persistent identifiers to all of the entities, activities, and agents relevant to provenance. Each identifier is mapped to a uniform resource identifier (URI) in the GCIS namespace, allowing use of those identifiers for the Semantic Web and other

linked data In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but r ...

systems. By categorizing, annotating, and linking provenance information, the GCIS becomes capable of answering provenance-tracking questions about global change research.

GCIS ontology

The GCIS Ontology promotes representation and documentation by incorporating the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

(W3C)’s recommendation on provenance modeling (PROV) into the design. The ontology uses the namespace prefix GCIS. A conceptual map of the GCIS Ontology version 1.2 is accessible on the Web.

References

{{Include-USGov , agency=U.S. Global Change Research Program , article=About the Global Change Information System , url=https://data.globalchange.gov/about Climate change organizations based in the United States Information systems