THE EARTHSCOPE DATA PORTAL

The EarthScope Data Portal, now in the alpha release is developed to provide a unified, single-point of access to EarthScope data and products from USArray, PBO, and SAFOD experiments. The portal features basic search and data access capabilities to allow users to discover and access EarthScope data using spatial, temporal, and other metadata-based (data type, station specific) search conditions.

In this presentation, we will describe the features, design and future improvements of the portal. This portal is being developed by a team consisting of GEON (Geosciences Network, http://www.geongrid.org), IRIS, UNAVCO, Stanford and ICDP. The portal search module invokes Web services developed by IRIS, UNAVCO, and Stanford to search for EarthScope data in the archives at each of these locations. The Web services provide information about all resources (data) that match the specified search conditions. Users can select from the returned data sets, add selected data to a “data cart”, and request the selected data to be packaged for download to the user. The services are also defined for “station discovery”, to find which stations are available for specified spatial and temporal bounds, and “data discovery”, to find the data sets that are available from the stations. The returned result set is organized in a hierarchical structure categorized based on the data type so the users can browse at ease and subsequently choose the specific datasets, which are then assembled in a user “workspace” and available for download.

The EarthScope Data Portal leverages the significant portal development efforts of the GEON Project at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, SDSC (http://portal.geongrid.org), and the development of Web services interfaces at the three data archive facilities. The portal is implemented using the open source GridSphere portal software infrastructure which supports the well-known Java portlet interface, viz. JSR 168 or the Portlet API. It uses a set of “core” portlets that have been developed in GEON for Data Registration, Search, and Workspace Services.

We will provide a report on the current state of development of the Portal. A preliminary deployment of the portal software has been done on systems at SDSC; initial design has been done for the StationDiscovery, DataDiscovery and DataPackaging services; and IRIS, UNAVCO, and Stanford have implemented alpha version of the corresponding Web services which runs on servers at their respective locations. Beta version of this capability will be demonstrated during the Geoinformatics 2008 presentation.