EAGER: Collaborative Research: Interoperability Testbed-Assessing a Layered Architecture for Integration of Existing Capabilities

ABSTRACT

This EAGER award creates an interoperability test bed to identify the components of an effective layered architecture for geoscience and environmental science research. In a layered architecture, every layer consists of different technologies, each of which uses different interaction protocols. The proposed project will examine a wide variety of existing technologies in terms of their effectiveness in working across present data silos. These technologies include data grids, workflow systems, policy management systems, web visualization services, and security protocols that work with various repository catalogs. Project goals are focused on developing cyberinfrastructure tools and approaches that allow geoscience data repositories to enable new science and more effectively make their data holdings discoverable and available to the public. Essential elements of the project include the collection and comparision of various approaches and existing tools to check effectiveness in handling and integrating geoscience data, and by automating processes needed to integrate various databases and data types. The project is led by a team of experts in cyberinfrastructure and geoscience data management and employs a spiral softwar3ee development approach. Broader impacts of the work include building infrastructure for science in order to facilitate data-enabled science in the geosciences. It will also produce results that are likely to be applicable to fields outside of the geosciences. The effort supports a larger NSF effort to establish a new paradigm in the development of an integrative and interoperable data and knowledge management system for the geosciences for a new NSF initiative called EarthCube.