GeoChronos: Challenges and Achievements

Challenges and Achievements Presented by Cameron Kiddle Research Fellow, Grid Research Centre, University of Calgary

An on-line platform
For:
Earth Observation Scientists
Facilitating:
Collaboration between scientists
Application access, management and sharing
Data access, management and sharing
Leveraging:
Web 2.0 and social networking technologies
Cloud computing technologies
Semantic Web technologies
Funded by:
CANARIE - Network Enabled Platform (NEP-1) program
Cybera
( http://geochronos.org/ ) OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010

Project Team OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 Dr. Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa University of Alberta Dr. John Gamon University of Alberta Dr. Benoit Rivard University of Alberta Dr. Rob Simmonds University of Calgary Prinicipal Investigators Project Coordination Platform Development Domain Scientists

Virtual Organization OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010

Existing cyberinfrastructure tools / services are at different stages of development
Rare that something “works out of the box”
Don’t quite do what you need them to do
Often lacking in fault tolerance / interoperability
Significant integration efforts required
Challenges - General OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010

Finding a platform that meets all of the scientists’ needs
Tried various platforms (Facebook, Ning) before settling on Elgg
Providing simple / intuitive user interfaces
Difficult maintaining balance between simplicity and functionality
Challenges - Collaboration OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010

Unique challenges in managing cloud platforms (virtualization)
Greater flexibility but more points of failure
Software licence restrictions
Many software licences do not support software-as-a-service model
Challenges - Applications OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010

Large variety of data from many sources
Lack of / insufficient metadata standards
Automated data acquisition inhibited by human-in-the-loop processes
Challenges - Data OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010

Achievements – Collaboration
Social networking portal
Elgg-based (elgg.org)
Social networking services
Blogs
Tags
Media/document sharing
Wikis
Friends/contacts
Groups
Discussions
Message boards
Calendars
Status
Activity Feeds
OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 http://geochronos.org/

Achievements - Applications
Interactive Application Service (IAS)
On-line, on-demand access to scientific applications
Share application sessions and data with other users
Access control to applications
Hosted on top of a cloud computing platform (ASPEN) that can dynamically provision resources on-demand
OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010

Achievements - Data
Spectral Libraries
Store, share and browse spectral data
Manage metadata for spectra
Create and share metadata schemas
View spectral plots, metadata, ancillary files and maps
OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010

Collaboration
Additional Elgg plugins to further enable collaboration
Publications, presentations ...
Open portal to public (later this year)
Applications
Batch processing and automated workflow services
Handle longer running data processing tasks and simulations
Automate data workflows (i.e., mosaic, reproject and subset MODIS data)
Data
Generalization of spectral library solution
Acquire, store, manage, browse and share other types of data
Employment of Semantic Web technologies
better link / relate data and enable ontological mapping between metadata standards
Work in Progress OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010

Contact Information OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 http://geochronos.org/ [email_address] http://grid.ucalgary.ca/ http://ceos.ualberta.ca/ http://www.cybera.ca/ Cameron Kiddle [email_address] http://pages.cspc.ucalgary.ca/~kiddlec/

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GeoChronos: Challenges and Achievements

by Cameron Kiddle on Mar 15, 2010

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