cnr

CNR – Italy

The National Research Council of Italy (CNR) is a public organization, its duty is to carry out, promote, spread, transfer and improve research activities in the main sectors of knowledge growth and of its applications for the scientific, technological, economic and social development of the Country. To this end, the activities of the organization are divided into seven macro areas of interdisciplinary scientific and technological research, concerning several sectors: biotechnology, medicine, materials, environment and land, information and communications, advanced systems of production, judicial and socio-economic sciences, classical studies and arts.CNR is distributed all over Italy through a network of institutes aiming at promoting a wide diffusion of its competences throughout the national territory and at facilitating contacts and cooperation with local firms and organizations. The Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research (CNR-IIA) undertakes research and innovation activities in several thematic areas dealing with Earth System Science, including the development of systems and technologies for geospatial data sharing and interoperability. CNR-IIA mainly participates in the proposal with its Division of Florence and branch in Bari. The Florence Division research activity focuses on the application of information science to manage, harmonize, and share Earth & Space Science resources (i.e. data, knowledge, services, and infrastructures). The Division has designed, developed and maintained the GEO Discovery and Access Broker (DAB) middleware technology that includes a discovery and an access & transformation broker. The Division of Florence of CNR-IIA plays a key role in the design, implementation, and operation of the multidisciplinary GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) and has been working with ESA-ESRIN for the GEOSS Portal development and operation. The Division also leads the Research Data Alliance (RDA) activities on data and information brokering services –see the RDA Brokering Interest Group. For OGC, the Florence Division of CNR-IIA leads the Earth System Science (ESS) Domain Working Group and the netCDF Standardization Working Group. The research activities of the branch of Bari of CNR-IIA focus on multiple source satellite EO data analysis for Land Cover/Use mapping, natural as well as urban habitat mapping, automatic change detection and geophysical (essential) variable extraction.

The project will essentially be implemented by:

  • Stefano Nativi is Head of the Florence Division of CNR-IIA, he coordinates the Earth and Space Science Informatics laboratory (ESSI-lab). He is member of the GEO Infrastructure Implementation Board (IIB) and of the GCI Provider WG, managing the GEO Discovery and Access Broker (DAB). He is member of Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service. He is member of the Steering Committee of the Belmont Forum e-Infrastructure and Data Management CRA. He is member of the INSPIRE Metadata Core Drafting Team. He is member of the NSF Earth Cube Architecture WG and chairs the RDA (Research Data Alliance) and the OGC Earth System Science DWG and netCDF SWG.
  • Palma Blonda is a senior researcher at CNR-IIA. Her research interests include Land Cover/Use classification and change detection with data driven (e.g., neural network, fuzzy logic, hybrid techniques) and knowledge driven techniques. She has participated to many national and international projects. Within FP7 framework, she was the coordinator of the BIO_SOS project (www.biosos.eu) funded, by the third SPACE call, and participated as Partner to the FIRESENSE (www.firesense.eu/) project. She is currently involved in the Horizon 2020 ECOPOTENTIAL (http://www.ecopotential-project.eu/) project and is responsible of the EO data processing activities within the project Consortium Coordination Team. She is also involved in the ConnectinGEO (www.connectingeo.net/ ) project.
  • Paolo Mazzetti is researcher at CNR-IIA Florence Division. He taught “Telematics” at the University of Florence at Prato for the degree in Information Engineering for seven years. He has more than fifteen years of experience in design and development of infrastructures and services for geo-spatial data sharing in the context of national, European (FP7, CIP, H2020) and global initiatives. He was member of the GEO Institutions Development Implementation Board (IDIB). He participates in the E-Infrastructures and Data Management Collaborative Research Action. He is the Italian national representative in the arctic data committees: IASC Data Standing Committee (IDSC) and the SAON Committee on Data and Information Services (CDIS).
  • Saverio Vicario is a Researcher in CNR-IIA. Its work produced reviewed articles in molecular systematics, genome evolution, bioinformatics and biodiversity. From a methodological point of view he has interest in developing and refining statistical methods to study biodiversity with special attention to phylogenetic approach and to observation obtained with a environmental sequencing. From an ICT perspective, he gained experience in the methodology to share analysis methods via ìweb services and workflow engine coupled with sharing of annotated code contributing to BioVeL portal and in answering to GEOSS AIP8 call. He participate in Drosophila 12 genomes community effort, in the LifeWatch Network, and in the FP7 projects BioVeL and Creative-B. He is member of the SIBE (Italian Society of Evolutionary Biology) and BITS (Bioinformatics Italian Society).
  • Mattia Santoro is researcher at CNR-IIA, Florence Division. His research focuses mainly on cyber (e)-infrastructures for multi-disciplinary interoperability, with particular interest for semantic discovery and environmental models interoperability. He participated to several national, European (FP7, H2020) and global projects and initiatives for the development of multi-disciplinary interoperability infrastructure. He was member of several GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilots (AIP). He is part of the GCI Providers group, where he is responsible for the GEO DAB operational environment.
  • Cristina Bassani is a Researcher at the CNR, since 2011. She has expertise on the atmospheric radiative transfer modelling (atmospheric physics and radiative effects of aerosol and gaseous species) and in-depth knowledge on the influence of atmospheric constituents (aerosol and gases) on the Earth observation signal. She developed physically-based atmospheric correction algorithm for specific satellite remote sensing data.
  • Roberto Roncella is a research grant holder at the Florence Division of CNR-IIA. He is a Software Engineer. He has been working on several FP7 and H2020 project dealing with Web Services and interoperability. Recently, he joined the GCI Team working on GEOSS Data Providers brokering.

Key expertise

  • Data and Information Science;
  • Web Data and Information Systems Interoperability;
  • Earth Observation;
  • EO Data Analysis;
  • Change detection;
  • Essential Variables generation;
  • Knowledge management;
  • Information extraction from data.