SHARING EARTH SCIENCE INFORMATION THROUGH INTEROPERABLE APPROACH AND CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE

Summary

Earth science data and information are generated, collected, and archived at geographically dispersed locations and computers by different organizations including government agencies, companies, and others. To leverage the legacy resources for discovering earth science information and knowledge, we need a convenient access to the resources in an integral and timely fashion. This paper presents a joint effort in developing the Earth Information Exchange, an earth science portal, to support this need by approaches based on interoperability and cyberinfrastructure. ESG, an interoperable portal, is used to provide interoperability support to access to heterogeneous resources. GMU Grid, as part of the cyberinfrastructure, is utilized to support time-consuming preprocessing, modeling, decision support tools operating. Semantic search is utilized in bridging different domains for sharing cross domain information and knowledge and refining research results. The functions are integrated into the Earth Information Exchange developed by the partnership of National Aeronautics and Space Administration, The Federation of Earth Science Information Partnership, and George Mason University to support the objective for facilitating the easily exchange of earth science information. The on-going effort will also provide a spatial web portal to access and improve earth science information holdings at different government agencies, educational and research institutions, and NGOs.

Introduction

Earth science data has been massively produced from satellite earth observations, in-situ sensor detections, computational model simulations, and other sources for use by its extensive science and research community. These data are most useful when made easily accessible to earth science researchers and scientists, to government agencies, and to society as a whole. To achieve an objective of applying observing and research results about Earth systems for improved knowledge gain and more effective decision support, government agencies and non government organizations are working together to develop, promote and implement interoperable architectures, geosciences data management and information technology approaches to share geospatial resources among data producers, distributors, modelers, decision supporters, and decision makers. The objective drives the delivery and application of earth system science research through integrated systems solutions. Successes have been made in various forms, for example, a) National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Applied Science Program sponsored decision support projects using NASA data through system solutions (Birk et al 2006), and NASA Geosciences Interoperability Office (GIO) has developed the Earth Science Gateway (ESG, Evans and Bambacus 2005), b) George Mason University (GMU) developed and deployed a grid and spatial web portal platform to support geospatial applications (CISC 2006), and c) the Federation of Earth Science Information Partnership (ESIP) initiates the vision of an Earth Information Exchange (EIE, ESIP 2005).

The ESG is a standards-based, web-services enabled geospatial portal that allows users to discover and access geospatial data and services, and also a prototype for demonstrating and advancing geoscience interoperability. The GMU grid and spatial web portal platform is connected with a community grid system, the Southeastern Universities Research Association Grid (SURAgrid, SURA 2005) and a nation wide next generation research computer network (LambdaRail, NLR 2005). The ESIP Federation is a network of researchers and associated groups that collects, interprets and develops applications for satellite-generated Earth observation information. One practical approach is to develop the Earth Information Exchange (EIE).

Approaches

The ESG was developed, through a public, consensus driven process, as a prototype web services portal to advance the discovery, access, and use of NASA's earth science data products. The ESIP Federation has identified requirements for this type of tool within its cluster communities and specific scientific research areas. These clusters and research areas directly contribute to the US commitments within national and international initiatives such as GEOSS. GIO, ESIP Federation, and GMU partner in an effort to leverage the three organizations' assets and utilizing emerging technologies on developing and advancing ESG and EIE in an interoperable way supported by the cyberinfrastructure as illustrated in the ESG-EIE architecture (figure 1): 1) meetings among communities are held to demonstrate ESG/EIE portal capabilities and solicit requirements to develop/improve portlets for EIE. 2) The development and evolution of application area portlets are lined up with ESIP application clusters and National Applications. 3) Workshop or telecoms are held to demonstrate ESG and EIE portal status. 4) EIE is maintained at eie.cos.gmu.edu for the time being. It will be changed to an ESIP domain name when it gets operational.

EIE includes support to 12 national application areas and relevant technological functions of semantic search, data quality, service quality, resource integration, interface & visualization, and RSS filter. With each phase focused on one technology area and one to three application domains (table 1).

TABLE 1 NEAR HERE

Prototypes

The EIE has been prototyped and under improving at eie.cos.gmu.edu. The following figures illustrate selected functionalities supported through EIE. The EIE provide data, information, knowledge ranged from data, information, knowledge, catalog, to services and applications.

Figure 2 depicts the EIE user interface of. The left side illustrates portlet entry to the 12 national applications and education, earth science research focus areas will be added thereafter. The middle column highlighted the recent breakthroughs and phenomena within earth science. The right side provides a searching tool to find and navigate the system easily. The tabs on top provide overview, collaboration, resources, and a map client to view all these different application areas in detail.

The also client provide access to interoperable geospatial web services to leverage heterogeneous geospatial resources through a service oriented architecture (SOA) providing finding, binding, and chaining functions. It can be utilized to support EIE in prototyping earth science applications in a fast fashion. The semantic search on refining searching results to different catalogs and support quality of services under development and based on the NOESIS tool developed by University of Alabama at Huntsville (Ramachandran et al 2005).

Conclusion and Discussion

This paper presents a joint effort among GMU, ESIP Federation, and NASA GIO in leveraging the cutting-edge information technologies (such as grid computing and web services) and geosciences interoperability in designing, developing, and operating the EIE. EIE leverages the cyberinfrastructure (Ian and Kesselman 2004), geosciences interoperability (Evans and Bambacus 2005), and spatial web portal (Yang et al 2007) technologies to interoperablely access heterogeneous geosciences resources, computing power, and existing knowledge to meet the needs of different levels of earth science information users from educators to earth scientists.

Acknowledgements

The research and development reported is sponsored by NASA under grant # NNX07AD99G

References Cited:

Birk R., Frederick, M., Dewayne L.C., and Lapenta M.W., 2006. NASA's Applied Sciences Program: Transforming Research Results into Operational Success, Earth Imaging Journal, 3(3): 18-23.

CISC, 2006, the joint Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing, George Mason University, http://landscan.scs.gmu.edu:8080/

ESIP, 2005, Earth Information Exchange, the Federation of Earth Science Information Partnership, http://www.esipfed.org/

Evans J. and Bambacus M., 2005. NASA's Earth-Sun System Gateway: an open standards-based portal to geospatial data and services, proceedings of IEEE IGARSS, 25-29 July 2005, Seoul, Korea, (2005): 4228-4231.

Ian F. and Kesselman C. . 2004, The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. ISBN 1-55860-475-8.?

NLR, 2005, National NamdaRail, http://www.nrl.net/

Ramachandran R., Movva S., Graves S., and Tanner S., 2005, ONTOLOGY-BASED SEMANTIC SEARCH TOOL FOR ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE,http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/102272.pdf

SURA, 2005, The grid platform of the Southeastern Universities Research Association, http://www.sura.org/programs/sura_grid.html

Yang P., Evans J., Cole M., Marley S., Alameh N., and Bambacus M., 2007. The Emerging Concepts and Applications of the Spatial Web Portal, PE&RS, 73(6): xxx-xxx, in press.

Figure 1. Interoperable (ESG) and Cyberinfrastructure (GMU Grid) supported EIE

Figure 2. Earth Information Exchange Interface

Table 1. Earth information exchange application areas and functions.

Relevant Organizations

EIE Application Areas

EIE functions

EPA, NASA

Air Quality

Semantic Search

NOAA

Disaster /Coastal /Water

Data Quality

EPA, NASA, DOE

Carbon /Energy/Education

Service Quality

CDC, EPA, NASA

Public Health/ Ecological

Resource Integration

USDA, NASA

Agriculture / Climate

Interface & Visualization

FAA, USDA, NASA

Aviation / Invasive Species

RSS filter