OpenTopography: GEOSPATIAL CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE FOR LIDAR TOPOGRAPHY DATA

Topography data acquired with LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) remote sensing technology have emerged as a fundamental tool for Earth science research. The impact of these massive publicly funded geospatial datasets can be maximized by providing online access to a range of potential users for research, education and outreach applications. The National Science Foundation-funded OpenTopography Facility hosted at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at University of California, San Diego, has developed a Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure to enable online access to Earth science-oriented high-resolution LIDAR topography data, online processing tools, and derivative products. We have developed a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) that leverages high-performance computational and data storage resources available at SDSC to provide a scaleable system for data access and on-demand processing tasks. Through this architecture, OpenTopography offers access to terabytes of lidar point cloud data, standard digital elevation models, and Google Earth image data, all co-located with computational resources for higher-level data processing. Presently OpenTopography serves thousands of users ranging from the academic Earth science community to public agencies and the private sector.

This poster will highlight the motivations, goals, and implementation of the OpenTopography cyberinfrastructure system. We will also provide a discussion of geoinformatics lessons learned and areas of ongoing research and development. Topics of active work include cloud-based data storage and processing approaches, federated access to remote data archives, and data citation and curation.