In the last decade, the pervasiveness of the Internet has become such that a world without direct access to the resources available has become unthinkable. However, at present the internet consists only of documents linked together. The Future Internet (FI), an initiative of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), seeks to expand this to the internet of People, Things and Services.

The ENVIROFI project, funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Program (FP7) Future Internet (FI) Call, addresses the Future Internet usage area of environmental observation services. Information and communication technologies (ICT) for the environment generate huge amounts of environmental observations. These data must be harmonised, exchanged between various stakeholders and processed - often in real time. ENVIROFI envisions a European observation Web for the environment enabled by the FI.

ENVIROFI will explore the next generation of an ICT infrastructure for environmental applications that will be global, decentralized, interactive, and dynamic; it will integrate data, services, and models from governments, the private sector, and other observation data into an Observation Web. This Observation Web will allow all participants to plug in their own use cases and experiment using a large variety of components in a Digital Living Lab.

Within the ENVIROFI project Work Package 1 “Bringing Biodiversity into the Future Internet” focuses on the use of Future Internet technology for survey, analysis, quality assurance, persistence and dissemination of biodiversity data, and will cover the following areas:

·      Analyse existing standards based data models for observational data for aptness of use for biodiversity occurrence data and document gaps. Propose extensions to observational data models standards as required for biodiversity occurrence data

·      Analyse requirements for mobile data entry devices for recording biodiversity occurrence data. These requirements will be defined in 2 “flavours”:

·         for professional researchers doing surveys within LTER Sites,

·         for interested amateurs working as citizen scientists in various groups

·      Define requirements for context aware quality assurance of reported data. Currently the following areas have been identified (but may be extended due to insights gained within the project):

1.        Spatial probability (i.e. Does this species fit into this biogeographical region?)

2.        Temporal probability (i.e. Can it be observed at this time of the year?)

3.        Comparison with common mis-identifications (i.e. Provide user with image of other types often confused with type identified - does the leaf of this species look like this?)

·      Create semantic backbone for:

1.      Structuring and storage of taxonomic information. This should include both scientific and common names

2.      Storing additional species information as required for context aware quality assurance (i.e. biogeographical regions of occurrence, types often wrongly identified)

3.      Semantic mapping between species lists (both common and scientific species names from national lists)

The current timeframe of the project is 2 years, starting April 2011 and running until March 2013. During the project runtime we will then apply for an extension as foreseen under the Future Internet call, allowing us to extend the prototypes developed within ENVIROFI to true production systems for the FI.