The initial Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment sought sustainable and automatable solutions to link multi-disciplinary, multi-organization environmental data without the requirement to transfer custody or burden of maintenance of data. It built on W3C best practices, providing guidance and a common approach for encoding environmental feature data and links between and among features and observational data about them. Using these technologies, it bridged the divide between the great flexibility and power of OGC services and the more focused and specific technologies that drive modern web development.
Building on the content-focused outcomes of the first ELFIE, the Second ELFIE (SELFIE) is designing and vetting Web-resource model and network behavior for cross-domain linked feature data that compliments and uses WFS3 as a building block. This aims to answer the question, how do we use linked data in a way that's compatible with W3C best practices and leverages OGC standards? The experiment aims for focused simplicity, representing resources built from potentially complex data for easy use on the Web. While the IE will test a specific resource model and will follow W3C best practices and OGC standards, a wide range of participant-provided domain-use cases will be used for testing. Ultimately, this work is intended to satisfy the needs of many use cases and many kinds of features, from disaster response and resilience to environmental health and the built environment.