DEVELOPING A WEB PORTAL FOR THE GEOSCIENCES COMMUNITY

Emerging breakthroughs in cyber-infrastructure can help provide access to vast collections of earth science data, processing methods, conceptual graphs, ontologies and a plethora of related information that has huge potential benefit to the research community. But to maximize the impact and utility of these hard-won resources it is vital to provide convenient ways to structure, access, visualize and interact with them (a scientific e-notebook for the geosciences).

Current approaches to developing cyber-infrastructure to support a distributed community of researchers have so far concentrated on the necessary computational and information systems that support such infrastructure (for example web portal technology, database federation schemes and the development of the semantic web). Here we focus our efforts on harnessing these latest computational developments via interfaces that embed them in the work practices of collaborating geoscientists, making them more accessible and, we hope, easier to use, less burdensome to adopt and able to offer more insight into the process of community-based scientific endeavors.

This paper describes our research efforts to date to help geoscientists organize, search and gain access to emerging geoscience resources held in distributed, digital collections, and exemplified by the GEON Network. These efforts revolve around the development of a shared electronic notebook that manages the exchange of datasets, experimental details, concept development and ontology among collaborating researchers. The e-notebook thus acts as a coordinating metaphor for organizing a geoscience web portal. We discuss the structure of this interface both conceptually and practically, show the kinds of inquiries it can support and provide use-case examples from our current prototype.