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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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 social-scientists, 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.

  1. 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.

  1. Leveraging Semantics and Crowdsourcing in Data Sharing and Discovery

PI: Thomas Narock, tnarockATmarymountDOTedu,University of Maryland | Co-PI(s): Timothy Finn

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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. Software Stewardship for the Geosciences

PI: Yolanda Gil, gilATisiDOTedu, University of Southern California | Co-PI(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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. GeoLink: Semantics and Linked Data for the Geosciences

PI: Robert Arko, arkoATldeo.columbiaDOTedu, Columbia University | Co-PI(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.”

  1. GeoSoft: Collaborative Open Source Software Sharing for the Geosciences

PI: Yolanda Gil, gilATisiDOTedu, University of Southern California | Co-PI(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.

  1. CyberConnector: Bridging the Earth Observations and Earth Science Modeling for Supporting Model Validation, Verification, and Inter-comparison

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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.