SUSTAINING A GEOSPATIAL SCIENCE GATEWAY TO SUPPORT FAIR SCIENCE PRACTICES AND TRAINING

Science gateways are becoming an integral component of modern collaborative research. They find widespread adoption by research groups to share data, code and tools both within a project and with the broader community. Sustainability beyond initial funding is a significant challenge for a science gateway to continue to operate, update and support the communities it serves. MyGeoHub.org is a geospatial science gateway powered by HUBzero. MyGeoHub employs a business model of hosting multiple research projects on a single HUBzero instance to manage the gateway operations more efficiently and sustainably while lowering the cost to individual projects. This model allows projects to share the gateway’s common capabilities and the underlying hardware and other connected computing resources, and continued maintenance of their sites even after the original funding has run out allowing time for acquiring new funding. MyGeoHub has hosted a number of projects, ranging from hydrologic modeling and data sharing, plant phenotyping, global and local sustainable development, climate variability impact on crops, and most recently, modeling of industry processes to improve reuse and recycling of materials. The shared need to manage, visualize and process geospatial data across the projects has motivated the Geospatial Data Building Blocks (GABBs) development funded by NSF DIBBs. GABBs provides a “File Explorer” type user interface for managing geospatial data (no coding is needed), a builder for visualizing and exploring geo-referenced data without coding, a Python map library and other toolkits for building geospatial analysis and computational tools without requiring GIS programming expertise. GABBs can be added to an existing or new HUBzero site, as is the case on MyGeoHub. Teams use MyGeoHub to coordinate project activities, share files and information, publish tools and datasets (with DOI) to provide not only easy access but also improved reuse and reproducibility of data and code as the interactive online tools and workflows can be used without downloading or installing software. Tools on MyGeoHub have also been used in courses, training workshops and summer camps. MyGeoHub is supporting more than 8000 users annually.