GEOSS AIP Response

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Community Components for the Air Quality Scenario in the GEO Architecture Implementation Pilot – Phase 2 (AIP-2)

Overview

Recently, the ESIP Air Quality Cluster has initiated the development of software components of which purpose is to provide specific software support for data sharing and data usage. These include: a community catalog, community portal and metadata workspaces. These components are being developed to support the general air quality community, broad interagency participation, persistency and applicability to multiple air quality-related applications. These services directly support the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot objective to: establish a broad set of persistent “operational, research and technical exemplars” services that support the GEOSS societal benefit areas (AIP CFP). It is also hoped that the feedback from Phase II of AIP will help in improving these components.

Many of the Cluster’s participants will be contributing to the GEOSS AIP through their respective individual organizations and the Cluster’s GEOSS participation will complement those contributions with community-driven efforts. The Cluster is uniquely positioned to serve as an intermediary between the air quality community and GEOSS because of its established network of air quality scientists, managers and information technology expertise. The Cluster provides the neutral forum and environment to conduct the GEOSS air quality community activities that inherently require cross-organization coordination or a neutral entity to foster networking, such as providing human technical assistance in using and implementing the GEOSS standards. Because of its multi-organization participation and community-driven nature, the Air Quality Cluster is considering a role in the formation of a GEOSS Air Quality Community of Practice, per recommendation from Gary Foley, co-chair of the GEOSS User Interface Committee.

Potential Contributions

Component and Service Contributions

The Cluster plans to work with the other AIP participants in the air quality scenario in three activities for the GEOSS Air Quality Community: Catalogs, Portal and Metadata workspaces. These components will allow the air quality community to easily interface with GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI).

Air Quality Community Catalog

Community catalogs are created through harvesting metadata from data system catalogs, individual datasets already available to the air quality community as well as reusable services and workflows (composite services) that have been developed by members of the community. In that sense, the air quality community catalog is an aggregator of air quality metadata records from other catalogs. One benefit that contributors to this catalog receive is that the community catalog is expected to interface with the broad GEOSS clearinghouse and registries. ESIP has created wiki-based metadata records (see metadata workspaces) for air quality related data access services accessible through DataFed. We plan to expand the usability of these metadata records and incorporate the ESIP Portal’s standards-based catalog access capabilities to create an initial catalog that allows other catalogs to access air quality metadata records in FGDC, ISO 19115, and SERF formats and that is able access metadata records from other catalogs, such as the GEOSS Clearinghouse. We plan to include user interfaces to the catalog interfaces in the air quality community portal.

Air Quality Community Portal

The GEOSS Common Infrastructure includes three GEOSS Portals for accessing environmental data. Community portals are envisioned to provide communities with a domain-specific interface to GEOSS. ESIP plans to create an air quality community portal based on previous work in developing an ESIP Portal and an air emissions portal (NEISGEI), both using the Open Source portal development of Liferay. The air quality community portal will incorporate semantic search features from the ESIP Portal and Web 2.0 collaboration features from the NIESGEI portal.

The ESIP portal is a joint effort among ESIP, NASA, George Mason University (GMU) and many other ESIP members, such as Washington Univ. and Institute of Global Environmental Studies. It is a typical Geoportal or Spatial Web Portal for the Earth science community that provides interface for users to search, access, visualize and download the information needed. The ESIP Portal is targeted to not only share information at the levels of metadata, data, services, applications and knowledge but also avoid duplicated efforts, inconsistencies, delays, confusion, and wasted resources.

The ESIP portal is developed based-on SOA and Liferay, an open source software platform. ESIP Portal services are developed with Java Servlet Technology and Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology for retrieving data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing portlet page, which makes the portlet to be more interactive and respond quickly.

A semantic search portlet, bridges different catalogs for sharing cross information and refining search results based on the NOESIS tool developed by University of Alabama at Huntsville and integration with interoperable standardized interface. A time-enabled OGC WMS viewer portlet and a 3D/4D visualization portlet, based on NASA World Wind, are available for inclusion in the air quality community portal.

Air Quality Community Metadata Workspaces

The ESIP Air Quality Cluster has developed a set of metadata workspaces for data services, wiki pages, which incorporate structured dataset metadata and harvest unstructured contextual information from the web, such as articles that reference a dataset or applications that use a dataset. There will also be metadata workspaces developed for processing services. The metadata workspaces are created on the wiki so that metadata can be contributed by any user from the data provider to the "end user" (Shown by blue dotted lines, in figure below). We would like to encourage air quality scenario participants to use the metadata workspaces throughout the Pilot. - better description needed not using structured/unstructured tech terms, give examples for structured)

Architecture and Interoperability Arrangement Development

The community-developed components (catalog, portal and metadata workspaces) are developed to interface with the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (Fig.1). The community catalog link to the metadata workspaces. The community catalog would be registerd as a component in the GEOSS Registry. Similarly, the community portal will provide AQ community domain specific data and metadata to the users by accessing the GEOSS portals and the GEOSS clearinghouse.

It is hoped that these interfaces to the GCI will enable users to better share their data and tools as well as access the data and tools of others.

Fig.1 AQ Community/GEOSS Architecture

Description of Responding Organization

The Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP Federation) is a broad-based community drawn from agencies and individuals who collectively provide end-to-end handling for Earth and environmental science data and information. By providing a neutral forum in which all Earth and environmental science stakeholders can meet on a peer basis, the ESIP Federation fosters collaborations and technical innovations aimed at making Earth and environmental science information more useful and accessible. The ESIP Federation’s flexible organization enables it to address timely issues through the formation of ad hoc groupings called clusters. An Air Quality Cluster has formed over the past 3 years to build better connections, both technical and interpersonal, among air quality data providers and data users. The AQ Cluster aims to bring people and ideas together on how to network earth science data/service providers with air quality researchers and managers, facilitate technologies and IT architecture for improving the flow of earth science data to air quality management and the broad range of information users, create a user-driven space for describing, documenting, and providing feedback about the many datasets and tools for adding values to data, and provide a forum for individual projects interested in using and/or sharing services. This effort promotes contributions to the creation of GEOSS.

The diverse multi-organization participation of the Cluster and its associated expertise also allow it to bridge the activities of the GEOSS Architecture Data Committee (ADC) and the GEOSS User Interface Committee (UIC), which have had only limited coordination to this point. The ADC is coordinating the GEOSS AI Pilot while the UIC addresses issues in meeting community user requirements for GEOSS. The creation of air quality community components in the GEOSS AI Pilot will involve coordination with both the ADC and UIC.

May not need the rest? Just focus on cluster with a link to these details on Federation?

The Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP Federation) is a broad-based community drawn from agencies and individuals who collectively provide end-to-end handling for Earth and environmental science data and information. The ESIP Federation was founded in 1998 by NASA in response to a National Research Council (NRC) review of the Earth Observation System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). The NRC called on NASA to develop a new, distributed structure that would be operated and managed by the Earth science community that would include those responsible for all elements of Earth observation, including observation, research, and ultimately, application and education. Beginning with 24 partners that were funded by NASA, the ESIP Federation's purpose was to experiment with and evolve methods to make Earth science data easy to preserve, locate, access and use by a broad community that was intended to include research, education, and commercial interests. NASA adopted a deliberate and incremental approach in developing the Federation by starting with a limited set of working prototype projects called ESIPs, representing both the research and applications development communities. These prototype projects were joined by the NASA data centers to form the core of the early ESIP Federation and were responsible for creating its governing structures and the collaborative community it is today. The ESIP Federation began as a distributed organization that is linked primarily by the Internet (i.e., a virtual organization), continuing successfully to this day to provide an evolving mechanism by which the community could voluntarily come together and act to define and serve their collective best interests.

The ESIP Federation’s strength continues to come from its more than 100 partner organizations, including all NOAA, NASA and USGS Earth observing data centers, government research laboratories, research universities, modelers, education resource providers, technology developers, nonprofits and commercial enterprises.

The ESIP Federation’s work is dedicated to providing the most up-to-date science based information to researchers, educators and decision makers who are working to understand and address the environmental, economic and social challenges facing our planet. By providing a neutral forum in which all Earth and environmental science stakeholders can meet on a peer basis, the ESIP Federation fosters collaborations and technical innovations aimed at making Earth and environmental science information more useful and accessible. The ESIP Federation’s flexible organization enables it to address timely issues through the formation of ad hoc groupings called clusters. By forming issue and technology based clusters around emerging topics of interest, strategic partners, committees and individual members can bring forward timely issues and gain input from the broader Earth and environmental science community. Topical clusters have been formed to address Air Quality, Carbon and Water Management and technology clusters have been formed to explore Web Services, Semantic Web and Sensor Web. The clusters evolve into vibrant communities of practice where the free exchange of ideas and collaboration among partners leads to major advances in a given field.

The work of the ESIP Federation is facilitated and managed by the Foundation for Earth Science (Foundation) which was created in 2001 to serve as the secretariat for the Federation. Under the provisions of a Memorandum of Understanding between the ESIP Federation and Foundation, the Foundation supports the ESIP Federation and its committees, working groups and clusters by providing professional staff support, strategic planning, meeting planning, fundraising, grants and financial management services.

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