BUILDING BLOCKS
Building Blocks (BBs) are intended to construct a cyberinfrastructure to better
connect existing resources, integrate and develop resources that would serve
broader communities, and begin the initial work of EarthCube (EarthCube
Strategic Science Plan: Geoscience 2020).
1. Deploying Web Services across Multiple Geoscience Domains
PI: Tim Ahern, timATiris.washingtonDOTedu, Incorporated Research
Institutions for Seismology | Co-PI(s): Michael Gurnis, Mohan
Ramamurthy, Suzanne Carbotte, Ilya Zaslavsky
This Building Blocks project intends to extend the promotion of simple
web services to simplify the task of discovering, accessing and using data
from multiple sources. Investigators will promote the use of this system
to manage data from the long tail of science and make it discoverable,
removing it from the domain of "dark data". The project will extend its
approach of exposing data sets through web services to those managed by
non-NSF data centers both within the United States as well as
international data sets by providing resources to stand up web services to
expose the data holdings of other centers. This building block is an effort
to engage EarthCube cyberinfrastructure in developing, establishing and
adopting international standards to allow geoscientists to focus on
science and increase productivity.
2. Specifying and Implementing ODSIP, A Data-Service Invocation
Protocol
PI: David Fulker, OPeNDAP, dfulkerATopendapDOTorg, | Co-PI(s): Mohan
Ramamurthy, Steven Businger, Brian Blanton, Peter Cornillon
This EarthCube building blocks project intends to build ODSIP (Open Data
Services Invocation Protocol) in order to provide an array of open
specification in client/server libraries. This project also seeks to provide a
system in which EarthCube can be built effectively around clients and
servers that employ common and conceptually rich protocols for data
acquisition.
3. A Broker Framework for Next Generation Geoscience (BCube)
PI: SiriJodha Khalsa, sjskATnsidcDOTorg, National Snow and Ice Data
Center | Co-PI(s): Stefano Nativi, Ruth Duerr, Jay Pearlman, Francoise
Pearlman
To address complex Earth system issues such as climate change and
water resources, geoscientists must work across disciplinary boundaries,
which requires them to access data outside of their fields. This award
brings together an internationally recognized team of geo- and socialscientists, cyberinfrastructure experts and educators to explore how
expert systems can mediate interactions and improve access between
scientific fields. The initial focus is on hydrology, oceans, polar and
weather, with the intent to make the technology applicable and available
to all the geosciences. The team’s social scientists and educators will
research how technology can improve knowledge exchange between
scientific communities.
4. Integrating Discrete and Continuous Data
PI: David Maidment, maidmentATutexasDOTedu, University of Texas at
Austin | Co-PI(s): Ethan Davis, Alva Couch, Damiel Ames
This project builds upon previous work focused on integrated discovery
of common information themes including precipitation in discrete data
from the CUAHSI hydrologic information system and continuous data
from the Unidata THREDDS data server. Investigators will advance that
work by exploring the creation of new technologies for publishing and
discovery of information through the Global Earth Observation System of
Systems (GEOSS) Common Infrastructure, the definition of a Common
Information Model for discrete and continuous data, development of
shared software tools for using this Common Information Model, and
extension of the concepts to similar information in the Polar, Ocean and
Solid Earth Sciences.
5. Leveraging Semantics and Crowdsourcing in Data Sharing and
Discovery
PI: Thomas Narock, tnarockATmarymountDOTedu,
Maryland | Co-PI(s): Timothy Finn
University
of
A wide spectrum of maturing methods and tools, collectively
characterized as Semantic Web Technologies, is enabling machines to
complete tasks automatically that previously required human direction.
For the Geosciences, Semantic Web Technologies will vastly improve the
integration, analysis and dissemination of research data and results. This
EAGER project will conduct exploratory research applying state-of-the-art
Semantic Web Technologies to support data representation, discovery,
analysis, sharing and integration of datasets from the global oceans, and
related resources including meeting abstracts and library holdings. A key
contribution will be semantically enabled cyberinfrastructure
components capable of automated data integration across distributed
repositories.
6. A Cognitive Computer Infrastructure for Geoscience
PI: Christopher Re, chrismreATcs.stanfordDOTedu, Stanford University |
Co-PI(s): Miron Livny, Shanan Peters
Today, access to information is often less of a problem than our ability to
discover, process and use it. Geoscience currently lacks a sustainable
cyberinfrastructure that can efficiently and with high precision and
accuracy find, extract, and organize data that are critical to advancing
many areas of science and leveraging current and past investments in
data acquisition. We are developing a geoscience-oriented trained
computing system, powered by world-class high throughput computing
infrastructure, that will serve as a cross-disciplinary tool for finding,
extracting, and organizing “dark data” from the text, tables, and figures of
hundreds of thousands of documents. Early results indicate that our
system can perform tasks of data identification and extraction reliably
and at a fraction of the time and cost of humans. We hope to produce a
dependable EarthCube building block that can serve many scientific
communities.
7. Earth System Bridge: Spanning Scientific Communities with
Interoperable Modeling Frameworks
PI: Scott Peckham, scott.peckhamATcoloradoDOTedu, University of
Colorado at Boulder | Co-PI(s): Gary Egbert, Cecelia DeLuca, David Gochis,
Jennifer Arrigo
This EarthCube Building Blocks project will draw from significant
disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise in the development,
implementation and support of geoscientific modeling architectures and
in the adoption of community standards in model development and data
management. This team will integrate existing model architectures, model
coupling standards, and data standards into a set of open-source Earth
System Bridge building blocks that will transform the process of Earth
system model coupling, and bridge the present technological gap.
8. Software Stewardship for the Geosciences
PI: Yolanda Gil, gilATisiDOTedu, University of Southern California | CoPI(s): Chris Mattmann, Scott Peckham, Erin Robinson, Christopher Duffy
This building blocks project is to research and develop a system whereby
geoscience and environmental software are generated effectively by
geoscientists themselves, so that the software can be captured, curated,
managed, and made available to all parties upon request. This project will
begin this process by building partnerships between computer scientists,
software developers, and scientists across all geoscience domains with
the goal or creating a software ecosystem and a culture of software
stewardship that will empower geoscientists and others to make their
software accessible and manage it as a valuable scientific asset.
9. Community Inventory of EarthCube Resources for Geosciences
Interoperability (CINERGI)
PI: Ilya Zaslavsky, zaslavskATsdscDOTedu, San Diego Supercomputer
Center
This Building Blocks project focuses on constructing a community
inventory and knowledge base on geoscience information resources to
meet the challenge of finding resources across disciplines, assessing their
fitness for use in specific research scenarios, and providing tools for
integrating and re-using data from multiple domains. The project team
envisions a comprehensive system linking geoscience resources, users,
publications, usage information, and cyberinfrastructure components.
This system would serve geoscientists across all domains to efficiently
use existing and emerging resources for productive and transformative
research.
10. A Geo-Semantic Framework for Integrating Long-Tail Data and
Models
PI: Praveen Kumar, kumar1ATillinoisDOTedu, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign | Co-PI(s): Scott Peckham, Leslie Hu
This Building Blocks project offers a unique and transformative approach
to integrate existing and emerging long-tail model and data resources.
The goal of this research is to develop a framework rooted in semantic
techniques and approaches to support long-tail models and data
integration. The vision is to develop a decentralized knowledge-based
platform that can be easily adopted across geoscience communities
comprising of individual and small group researchers. This project will
focus on integrating two long-tail resources, the Community Surface
Dynamic Modeling System (CSDMS) and Sustainable Environment
Actionable Data (SEAD) as an example of closing the loop from model
queries back to data sources. In addition, the concepts and tools
developed will be developed to allow automated coupling of models and
data coming from different contributors.
11. Enabling Scientific Collaboration and Discovery through Semantic
Connections
PI: Matthew Mayernik, mayernikATucarDOTedu, UCAR | Co-PI(s): Linda
Rowan, Dean Krafft
This Building Blocks project brings together the National Center for
Atmospheric Research (NCAR), UNAVCO, and Cornell University to
understand how to improve the processes of collaboration and resource
sharing in the geosciences by demonstrating and encouraging the
adoption of structured information systems rooted in common standards.
Using two large geoscience research programs as case studies, this effort
will demonstrate how semantic web and linked data technology can play
an essential role in the coordination and organization of scientific virtual
organizations and their products, thereby accelerating the pace of
scientific discovery and innovation. Using the open source VIVO software,
this project will seek to interlink information and data across platforms
and research projects in an ontology-based standard data format (RDF),
utilizing well developed web identifier and vocabulary structures.
12. GeoLink: Semantics and Linked Data for the Geosciences
PI: Robert Arko, arkoATldeo.columbiaDOTedu, Columbia University | CoPI(s): Pascal Hitzler, Thomas Narock, Douglas Fils, Mark Schildhauer,
Cynthia Chandler
This Building Blocks project brings together significant geosciences
holdings in the ocean, earth and polar sciences to demonstrate how
innovative technologies can be robustly applied to these facilities to
enhance the capabilities for scientists to discover and interpret relevant
geoscience data and knowledge. The end product, GeoLink, will lower
barriers to cross-repository data discovery and access, while respecting
and preserving repository autonomy and heterogeneity. GeoLink seeks to
develop a cyberinfrastructure that allows searching and browsing of
content from multiple data sources through semantic integration of
digitally published “Linked Open Data.”
13. GeoSoft: Collaborative Open Source Software Sharing for the
Geosciences
PI: Yolanda Gil, gilATisiDOTedu, University of Southern California | CoPI(s): Scott Peckham, Christopher Duffy, Erin Robinson
The goal of this Building Blocks project is to create a system for software
stewardship in geosciences that will empower scientists to manage their
software as valuable scientific assets. It will significantly improve the
adoption of open data and open software initiatives, improve
reproducibility, and advance scientific scholarship. Scientific software
stewardship requires a combination of cyberinfrastructure, social
infrastructure, and professional development infrastructure. This project
seeks to facilitate the publishing, dissemination and stewardship of
scientific software, with the goal of improving the adoption of open data
and open software initiatives, as well as furthering scientific scholarship
and collaboration.
14. CyberConnector: Bridging the Earth Observations and Earth Science
Modeling for Supporting Model Validation, Verification, and Intercomparison
PI: Liping Di, ldiATgmuDOTedu, George Mason University
This Building Blocks project will 1) significantly increase research
productivity in the Earth science modeling community, 2) enable the
effective use of the existing Sensor Web data and Earth Observations
through open Web interfaces and metadata standards, 3) foster
collaborations among Earth system modelers, geospatial information
scientists, and information technologists, and 4) enhance infrastructure
for Earth science research and education. CyberConnector is intended to
facilitate automatic preparation and feeding of customized data and
derived products into Earth science models. This project seeks to make
model creation and inter-comparison significantly easier, by starting with
available data and expanding the CyberConnector infrastructure to many
different Earth models.
15. Digital Crust: An Exploratory Environment for Earth Science
Research and Learning
PI: Ying Fan Reinfelder, yingfanATepsDOTrutgersDOTedu, Rutgers
University, New Brunswick | Co-PI(s): Shanan Peters, Ilya Zaslavsky
This Building Blocks project develops the Digital Crust, an online
workspace that allows for the linking, access, and extraction of all data
related to the Earth’s crust, with the goal of facilitating the creation of 4D
data products from those linked data sets. The platform can serve as a
resource to bring together geoscientists working on separate aspects of
the Earth system, by bringing their data/ideas together and by providing
an environment to view the Earth from different perspectives. Hosting
multiple data types and sometimes conflicting interpretations and
hypotheses of Earth processes will promote community discussion and
debate on Earth processes that will foster interaction, collaboration, and
data/idea sharing among scientists who might otherwise never have met.
Digital Crust also seeks to be a resource for educators and other
interested in introducing students to the Earth sciences, and to expose
gaps in data-knowledge with regards to the Earth’s crust.
16. GeoDataspace: Simplifying Data Management for Geoscience Models
PI: Tanu Malik, tanumATciDOTuchicagoDOTedu, University of Chicago
When developing, testing, validating, and comparing models, particularly
coupled models, the number of such data elements and the complexity
associated with their management soon outgrows human memory
capacity. The unfortunate consequence is that researchers often narrow
the scope of a model analysis, compromise research quality, or conduct
analysis within restricted teams. This Building Blocks project will
demonstrate a mechanism to overcome this challenge in the scientific
community. GeoDataspace seeks to develop methods of defining, sharing
and accessing the collections of metadata needed to define the files used
in a given computational model, and details of the model run. It is the
goal that this approach will simplify model use and enhance sharing,
reuse, and the reproducibility of models, data and computation
properties.
17. Cloud-Hosted Real-Time Data Services for the Geosciences (CHORDS)
PI: Michael Daniels, danielsATucarDOTedu, UCAR | Co-PI(s): V.
Chandrasekar, Sara Graves, Branko Kerkez, Frank Vernon
The Cloud-Hosted Real-time Data Services for the Geosciences (CHORDS),
a real-time data management infrastructure will provide a system to
archive, navigate and distribute real-time data streams via the Internet,
and employ data and metadata formats that adhere to standards, which
simplify the user experience.