DATA FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

The Second National Conference on Scientific and Technical Data

ABSTRACTS OF TECHNICAL DEMONSTRATIONS

(arranged by principal author in alphabetical order)

NASA's Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have recently collaborated to establish the Agricultural Research Online System (AGROS). The collaboration has resulted in broader availability of metadata from USDA-funded research, including soil, crop and plant, forest, rangeland, animal sciences, through both AGROS and the GCMD. The GCMD database includes descriptions of data sets covering climate change, the biosphere, hydrosphere and oceans, geology, geography, and human dimensions of global change. The Directories, with more than 8000 entries, are accessible by various search methods, ranging from free-text, keyword, to more complex queries over the Internet. Searches can be refined using temporal and spatial constraints. In addition to search and retrieval software, the GCMD maintains metadata authoring tools and conversion software for different metadata standards. Metadata are written using the Directory Interchange Format (DIF) content standard, which is compatible with the Federal Geographic Data Committee's (FGDC) Content Standard on Digital Geospatial Metadata and Dublin Core. The AGROS Data Directory is located at http://agros.usda.gov. The GCMD is located at http://gcmd.nasa.gov.

The CIESIN Gateway has evolved significantly from its origins as a data search tool based on relatively closed protocols. The current version utilizes the internationally recognized Z39.50 information retrieval protocol to search some 60 different data catalogs and other information resources around the world in parallel. It recognizes several different metadata standards, including the Federal Geographic Data Committee's Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata, the Government Information Locator Service, and the Directory Interchange Format. The search interface can be adapted flexibly using standard WWW tools.

Versions of the CIESIN Gateway have been deployed in support of the CIESIN World Data Center for Human Interactions in the Environment, the Inter American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) Data and Information System, the Earth Science and Technology Organization in Japan, the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, the Global Change Research Information Office, and the World Bank. A current challenge is to help users efficiently search the large number of possible catalogs from diverse disciplines, institutions, and regions; CIESIN is exploring how to implement automated targeting of relevant catalogs based on a user's query and other ways to help users deal in essence with the successful implementation of data catalog interoperability.

The Surface Water Integration System (SWIS) Spatial Prototype for Arcview is designed to fulfill a number of criteria based on the needs identified by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) user community. First and foremost, the prototype will provide users with tools to query and analyze hydro-related data using spatial methods. The foundation for this functionality will be the WDNR 24k Hydro spatial data set. This data set incorporates advanced linear and areal features that provide an intelligent hydrographic framework. Data "events" can be attached to this geographic information system (GIS) and related to one another spatially.

Another major criterion of the SWIS prototype for Arcview is that it be based on the data distribution and implementation effort being developed the WDNR. This model provides a standard mechanism by which staff can easily access resource information throughout the state. The hydro data, in combination with other base layers, provides the framework on which the SWIS prototype associates disparate natural resource parameters, including fisheries, pollution, and dams.

The Information Technology and Systems Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville will demonstrate one or more systems that address several multidisciplinary issues in managing and using scientific and technical data for both research and applications. The integrated approach of both information and physical scientists being involved in the development and evolution of these systems has been the key to the success of these endeavors.

The Event/Relationship Search System (E/RSS), HyDRO (Hydrology Search, Retrieval and Order System) and the Eureka Data Mining Toolkit are all systems that can be demonstrated. The E/RSS is used to assist users in formulating requests for customized orders or subsets of data. It is also used for coincidence or relationship testing between such factors as geographic regions, political boundaries and phenomena for specific time periods. HyDRO allows users to search, retrieve and order data at the Global Hydrology and Climate Center. The Eureka Data Mining Toolkit is used to provide technical support to multidisciplinary users attempting to apply data mining techniques to problem solving.

The Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) is one of eight discipline-specific Earth science and data centers that comprise the NASA-held Earth observing data. The GES DAAC is an active archive primarily for atmospheric, hydrologic, and ocean color data that provides data, information and services for global change research, applications, and education. Its mission is to maximize the investment of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise by providing data and services that enable people to realize the scientific, educational, and applications potential of global climate data. The GES DAAC aim is to be a facility for studying the natural and human processes that influence Earth's climate.

The GES DAAC works closely with both the science teams who supply data to the archive and the science, applications, and education data users. Working with the data suppliers, the GES DAAC personnel ensure the integrity of the archived data and are prepared to support the data and the data systems. The GES DAAC provides tools to support data processing and preliminary science analysis. Providing user services is a crucial part of the GES DAAC work.

Data are available electronically using Internet browsers, by file transfer protocol (ftp), and on digital tape. The various operational features of the GES DAAC will be demonstrated and explained.

The Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF), a member of NASA's Earth Science Information Partnership, located at the University of Maryland, College Park, will demonstrate a number of web-based tools for searching, viewing and ordering land cover data and derived data products. The demonstration will include MOCHA (Middleware Based On a Code SHipping Architecture), a system for querying and retrieving distributed earth-science data, as well as tools for real-time viewing and manipulating Landsat Thematic Mapper data. The purpose of the GLCF is to provide the global change and earth science communities a portal to low-cost land cover data products.

Duluth is a web-based system allowing web-naive domain experts to create parallel hierarchical taxonomies of web resources (URLs). Duluth allows these experts to uses these taxonomies to manage information, and users of the taxonomies to find it. Users have a 'read-only' view, allowing them to navigate and search the taxonomy based on the classification labels ('subjects'), groupings (hierarchy-specific classification), and various URL resource metadata attributes, such as title, type, keyword, etc. Users can register interest in changes to parts of the taxonomy and have Duluth contact them periodically with these changes. The parallel taxonomies share a common metadata base of canonically classified URL resources. This allows for greater scaling of expensive and usually scarce human classification resources.

Duluth presently supports two languages, English and French. Duluth is implemented in Java using the Java Servlet architecture, and is Open Sourced.

The recent successful launch of NASA's Terra mission and the existence of other remote sensing satellites already in orbit or to be launched over the next decade, will provide for an unprecedented opportunity for global coverage of the Earth. Platforms will be observing the Earth's oceans, lands and atmosphere and collecting data with volumes approaching a terabyte per day. It is expected that many different communities will have interest to access these data sets but with diverse goals and capabilities. To facilitate data access to large volumes of data, users need to obtain information on the content of data before they proceed to order data sets that may or may not serve their needs. At GMU we have developed the concept and a working prototype for Virtual Domain Application Data Center (VDADC) (http://compton.gmu.edu/~vdadcp/html/vdadc_description.html) to facilitate data access and querying. The VDADC maintains global L3 data sets supporting interdisciplinary Earth science and provides on-line analysis capabilities of these data sets.

As a follow-on and natural evolution of the prototype, we are developing a distributed data system designed to serve seasonal to interannual science communities which include El Niño and monsoon studies, teleconnection effects, as well as TRMM scientists and regional experiments such as the South China Sea Monsoon Experiment.

Specifically, the Seasonal to Interannual Earth Science Information Partner (SIESIP) is a distributed data and information system consisting of several physically distributed nodes: George Mason University, the Center for Ocean, Land, Atmosphere Studies (COLA), the NASA Goddard Distributed Active Archive Center (GDAAC) and the University of Delaware. Support is also provided by GMU TRMM Science Data Information System (TSDIS) staff. SIESIP is part of NASA's Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) program. The information technology implementation involves three nodes (GMU, COLA, GDAAC) using a multitiered client-server architecture. The implementation allows for flexibility in data access by utilizing different metadata, different ingest protocols, and different data access modes. A data access and querying system is being implemented that will provide on-line data access, data order and data analysis/browsing capabilities. The popular GrADS analysis package is being enhanced and included in the three-phase process as well as TRMM data access via a web-accessible OrbView package developed for TRMM scientists. The project is described at http://www.siesip.gmu.edu . We will demonstrate features of the system including data access, data analysis and interoperability within SIESIP and with other distributed data systems such as the Distributed Oceanographic Data System (DODS).