Peter Arzberger is Chair of the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA; www.pragma-grid.net ), an open, institution-based organization of 2 9 institutions. PRAGMA, founded in 2002, has a mission to build sustained collaborations among researchers around the Pacific Rim by building applications on top of emerging Grid hardware and software. Connected with PRAGMA is PRIME, the Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experiences ( prime.ucsd.edu ) program, which provides international research and cultural internship experiences to undergraduate students. PRIME, founded in 2004, has admitted 36 students and sent students to four PRAGMA sites. Arzberger is helping develop another international activity, GLEON ( http://www.gleon.org ), the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network. GLEON is a grassroots network of people, institutions, programs, and data linked by cyberinfrastructure and united by the mission to understand and predict the response of lake ecosystems to natural processes and human activities at regional, continental, and global scales.

Arzberger is also Director of the National Biomedical Computation Resources ( http://nbcr.net ), an NIH National Center for Research Resource award. NBCR's mission is to develop computing and information technologies (e.g., end-to-end tools in cyberinfrastructure) to catalyze and facilitate biomedical research across a broad range of biological scales. He is also Chair of the National Advisory Board to the U.S. Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network.

Arzberger is the former Executive Director of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) and a former Program Officer at the National Science Foundation in Computational Biology.

Topic of keynote speech: "Building the e-science Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network Community"

Water, an increasingly limited resource, plays a key role in agriculture, transportation, recreation, and life on this planet. Lakes and other surface waters play a critical role as integrators of environmental and ecological disturbances and sentinels of change. Understanding the role that lakes play in the environment and the dynamics that govern them is critical to helping manage them. But to understand lakes' impact at regional, continental and global scales requires a network of lakes outfitted with sensors transmitting data, and of experts connected by a global cyberinfrastructure.

In this presentation we will talk about a grass-roots effort to build such a network. The Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON, gleon.org) was established in 2005 and has continued to expand. This talk will cover the science driving the development of the network, the cyberinfrastructure necessary to make it work, and the associated education and community building to sustain the effort. GLEON is closely associated with and grew out of the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA, www.pragma-grid.net ). We will also see how the two activities interact, and are linked with the Pacific Rim Experiences for Undergraduates (PRIME, prime.ucsd.edu)

It is our hope that this presentation will generate interest and greater participation in this activity.

Ryosuke Shibasaki is a Professor at the Center for Spatial Information Science, University of Tokyo. His research interests cover spatial data acquisition techniques of a real world, data model development and their applications especially in environmental fields in conjunction with agent-based models. Major targets of data acquisition and modeling are such fundamental data that can support diversified data uses as social "infrastructure" or spatial data infrastructure (SDI). The research is also extending to design or planning methodologies to determine what kinds or types of spatial data with what level of quality should be shared and developed as spatial data infrastructure (SDI). Target scales of spatial data are two-folds; street-block to city scale and continental to global scale. He obtained a Ph.D. in remote sensing/GIS from the University of Tokyo in 1986. He was an Associate Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering (1988-1991) and the Institute of Industrial Science , the University of Tokyo (1991-98). He is a Vice President of Asian GIS Association, a board member of the GIS Association of Japan, Japanese Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing and a chairperson of IT technical committee of Japanese Association of Civil Engineers.

Research Fields: Environmental Information, Design of Spatial Information

Topic of keynote speech: " Data Integration of Earth Observation Data for GEOSS(Global Earth Observation System of Systems) ”

GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) is an effort of integrating Earth Observation Systems to contribute to social benefit areas such as disaster prevention, food security, health and so forth. The origin of GEOSS goes back to The First Earth Observation Summit convened in Washington , D.C. , in July 2003. The EO summit adopted a Declaration establishing the ad hoc intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (ad hoc GEO) to draft a 10-Year Implementation Plan of GEOSS.

To realize the concept of GEOSS, establishing the interoperability of data and systems is a key issue. The interoperability is required in each step starting from data discovery, data interpretation, data analysis, data assimilation to data uses. For data discovery, the standard design of metadata, registries of system components, their interfaces have to be made. Data interpretation is required to correctly understand what data represent and their quality and reliability. This process can be supported by referring to ontological information such as the definition of data and associations. In analyzing a very large amount of data, data mining techniques are crucially important especially to explore possible associations among data. Data assimilation is needed to fill gaps among fragmentary observational data through models that represent the spatio-temporal dynamics. As a result, dense spatio-temporal datasets such as 3D or 4D data cube can be provided, which can support various applications effectively.

Efforts of developing information systems to support the whole process are demonstrated through a case study of water circulation and flood management.