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

Challenges and Achievements

Presented by Cameron KiddleResearch 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/)

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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

Virtual Organization

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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

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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

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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

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Large variety of data from many sources Lack of / insufficient metadata standards Automated data acquisition inhibited by

human-in-the-loop processes

Challenges - Data

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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

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http://geochronos.org/

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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

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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

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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

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Contact Information

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http://geochronos.org/[email protected]

http://grid.ucalgary.ca/ http://ceos.ualberta.ca/ http://www.cybera.ca/

Cameron [email protected]://pages.cspc.ucalgary.ca/~kiddlec/