An On-line Collaborative Platform for Earth Observation Scientists

John Gamon Cameron KiddleArturo Sanchez-Azofeifa Roger CurryBenoit Rivard Nayden Markatchev Gilberto Zonta Pastorello Jr. Rob Simmonds Arie Croitoru Tingxi Tan

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/)

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Motivation Scientific Gateways

Aim to enable collaboration and transparent access to data and computational resources

Social Networking Can enhance collaboration capabilities around data

and applications – “Facebook for Scientists” Facebook Widely adopted

> 300 million users (50% log on to Facebook on any given day) > 1 billion chat messages per day > 2 billion photos, 14 million videos uploaded per month > 350 thousand applications on Facebook Platform

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Based around “Groups” with common interests Technology

Portal built on top of a social networking platform Elgg (http://www.elgg.org) Tags, bookmarks, profiles, blogs, wikis Friends/contacts, groups Discussions, message boards, calendars Status, activity feeds

Interactive Applications Cloud Computing

Collaboration

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Dashboard

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“Groups” within GeoChronos

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Groups - Example: Wireless Sensor Network Summer School

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Interactive Application Service (IAS) On-line, on-demand access to scientific applications Share application sessions and data with other users

Hosted on a cloud computing platform Use ASPEN (http://grid.ucalgary.ca/projects/DataCentre/) dynamically provision virtual machines to host applications

Batch processing and automated workflow services (Work in Progress) Handle longer running data processing tasks and simulations Automate data workflows involving data acquisition and

transformation of data into different data products more suitable for use by scientists (e.g., mosaic, reproject and subset MODIS data)

Applications

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Application Catalogue

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Interactive Application Service (IAS) Example - TIMESAT

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Technology iRODS (http://www.irods.org/) for data

storage/management Semantic Web technologies such as RDF (Resource

Description Framework) to link/relate data Examples

Spectral Libraries Store, share and browse spectral data View spectral plots, metadata, ancillary data and maps Manage and generate metadata for spectra Create and share metadata schemas

Generalization of spectral library solution for other types of data (work in progress)

Data

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Spectral Library – Browse Spectra

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Spectral Library – View Metadata

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Vegetation Spectral Library

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Example courtesySantonu Goswami, Univ. Texas, El Paso

Vegetation Library – Metadata

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Spectral Library – Ancillary data

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Example courtesySantonu Goswami, Univ. Texas, El Paso

Spectral Library – Location Map

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Portal Usage Over 70 users from Europe, South America and

North America Used at IAI International Wireless Sensor

Networking Summer School in Edmonton in July 2009 (~40 participants)

On-going usage by Tropi-Dry community for collaboration and sharing documents

Slowly opening up portal to different communities of users as development progresses

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Goal – “Virtual Organizations”

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Project Team

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Dr. Arturo Sanchez-AzofeifaUniversity of Alberta

Dr. John GamonUniversity of Alberta

Dr. Benoit RivardUniversity of Alberta

Dr. Rob SimmondsUniversity of Calgary

Prinicipal Investigators

Project Coordination Platform Development Domain Scientists

Contact Information

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http://geochronos.org/info@geochronos.org