Open data and environmental data, advances and opportunities

The environment is a concern and a matter of general interest for our society. We should not be surprised, therefore, by the numerous initiatives within the universe of open data for the publication of information related to the environment, both internationally and locally. These initiatives cover different aspects of the environment within the competences assigned to government bodies and agencies: natural resource management, biodiversity, air quality, climate and atmospheric information, and many more.

As environmental topics are very diverse, the typology and nature of the data can also be diverse. It is not easy a priori to find homogeneous universal criteria to describe the wide variety of information related to the description of the environment (for example, ranging from the population of a subspecies of cod near Iceland to levels of solar irradiance in an area of ​​Extremadura). Therefore, for clarity, a separation is established between "data on the environment" (any information describing some aspect of the environment in a general sense) and "environmental data" (the second being a subset of the first)

Expressed intuitively, environmental data consists of measurements of physical and chemical magnitudes, usually obtained using specific instrumentation, such as sensors or measuring equipment. In general, this data describes observations (or measurements) whose value must be related at least to the following information:

• Description of the nature of the physical magnitude.
• Spatial and/or geographical dimension.
• Time dimension.
• Unit of measurement.
• Description of the instrumentation.

As regards existing vocabularies for the description of "environmental data", the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (currently still at draft stage) should be noted. This vocabulary is a joint effort between the W3C Consortium  and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Also worth noting is the possibility of applying the RDF Data Cube vocabulary, although perhaps its use cannot be generalized in all cases.

At European level, the European Environment Agency (EEA) provides a very comprehensive catalogue of data in direct collaboration with Member States and other initiatives such as the Copernicus programme. This program is managed inter alia by the European Space Agency ESA) and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). This programme, on the one hand, captures environmental data via satellites and sensor systems that measure physical, maritime, climatic and atmospheric physical magnitudes and, on the other hand, provides this information through free and open services for the general public and European companies.

In the last edition of the international open data conference: IODC 16 (International Open Data Conference) held in Madrid last October, the environment was one of the central issues, with a slot specifically dedicated to discussing advances and opportunities for the use of open data for understanding the climate globally, biodiversity resource management and other related issues. This is an unequivocal sign that the environment has acquired strategic relevance in international agendas for the opening up of data.