1. VIVO Conference 2013
Panel on VIVO Use-Cases for Collaborative
Science: From Researcher Networks to
Semantic User Interfaces for Data
Patrick West – Tetherless World Constellation
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY

2. Introduction
• Patrick West – Senior Software Engineer
• Tetherless World Constellation
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Intstitute
• TWC
– A Constellation at RPI that consists of three senior faculty of James A. Hendler,
Deborah L. McGuiness, and Peter Fox and Joanne Luciano an Associate
Professor
– Any given time we have 20+ Ph.D. students, 3-5 Master’s Students, and 3-5
Undergraduate students plus
– Span many different departments in the University, mainly Cognitive Science,
Earth and Environmental Science, Computer Science, and Information
Technology and Web Science
– The projects that I focus on are related to data science, data management, data
stewardship, science informatics, and knowledge provenance
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3. Deep Carbon Observatory
• Deep Carbon Observatory
– Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Funded
– DCO is a much larger project with many different collaborators from all around
the world who are focusing on the study of Carbon in the Deep Earth.
– Four main areas of study are
• Deep Energy – developing a fundamental understanding of environments
and processes that regulate the volume and rates of hydrocarbons and
other organic species.
• Deep Life – assessing the nature and extent of deep microbial and viral
biosphere
• Reservoirs and Fluxes – identifying the principal deep carbon reservoirs
and determining the mechanisms and rate by which carbon moves within
these reservoirs
• and Extreme Physics and Chemistry - focused on improving our understand
of the physical and chemical behavior of carbon at extreme conditions.
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4. DCO-DS
• DCO-DS (Data Science)
– Collaborators from many different organizations including the University of
Rhode Island, Carnegie Institution for Science, Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory of Columbia University, groups within RPI itself, and many others.
– Our work centers around data management and data management planning,
data stewardship, data discovery, science informatics, and data infrastructure,
and knowledge provenance.
– Tasks include the ability of DCO scientists and researchers to register, store,
and provide semantic metadata for various data products and research products
– Want to give the DCO community, as well as outside interests such as
researchers from other projects, students, educators, etc… the ability to learn
about the project, discover information about researchers, research
organizations, and research products such as publications, papers,
presentations, articles; and find and access various data and data products
related to the DCO project.
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5. DCO-DS
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6. Integration
• Drupal – for collaborative work within the project as well as
information about the project and the various groups within the
project. It’s a community portal.
• CKAN – allow scientists to register, and potentially store, data,
data products, and research products related to DCO.
• VIVO – which we hope to be the hub of information for the
entire project. A place to discover information about the
project; find and access data, data products, and research
products; find and read reports generated from research by the
DCO community; and more.
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7. DCO-DS Architecture
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8. Assigning that DCO-ID
• Assigning a Digital Object ID to every object
– People
– Organizations
– Awards
– Projects
– Datasets
– Specimens
– Data Products
– Instruments
– Sensors
– Platforms
– Deployments
– Documents
– Etc…
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9. Assigning a DCO-ID
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10. In VIVO
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11. Resolves to
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12. Use Cases
• Trends in volcanic gas emission on the scale of regions
or arcs can be compared, and interpreted in order to
gain insight into the cyclicity of
activity and occurrence of eruptions
• Find researchers from across the Deep Carbon
Observatory effort who are interested in researching the
causes of a specific phenomenon related to deep
carbon reservoirs.
• I need data for Carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, a
climate change indicator, for the summer of 2012, that
can be accessed via OPeNDAP Hyrax and plotted as a
timeseries.
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13. Future Work
• Authentication and Authorization
– Across the different components VIVO, Drupal, and CKAN
– OpenID
– GeoPass
• Scalability
– 100s of billions of triples to be expressed
• Ingest
– Some organizations already have data and metadata, FOAF
documents, etc… that need to be ingested into the DCO system
• Integration
– One look and feel
– Entry and Edit from one place
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14. More Information
• Deep Carbon Observatory
– http://deepcarbon.net
• Tetherless World Constellation
– http://tw.rpi.edu
• DCO-DS
– http://tw.rpi.edu/web/project/DCO-DS
• Thanks
– Peter Fox, DCO-DS PI
– John Erickson, Staff, RPI
– Marshall Ma, Post Doc, RPI
– Han Wang, Yu Chen, Boliang Zhang, Xixi Luo, Corey Li
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