Breakout Sessions-Day 2
January 10, 2008
Breakout Sessions #1, 1:30-3:30 p.m.
Techncial Breakout 3a - Development of Interoperable Application Components Through JSR-168 Standard
Time | Session | Leader | |
---|---|---|---|
1:30-2:15 | UAH Portal Development/Interoperability | Ken Keiser or other UAH Rep. | |
2:30-3:15 | EIE Portal Development/Interoperability | Phil Yang |
Techncial Breakout 3b - Client-Side Tech Infusion and DIAL demo
"All software sucks," Jaron Lanier is famous for saying... This is his way of telling users to demand more from their software designers.
The Client Side Technology Infusion [CSTI] Working Group looks directly at issues of data access, analysis, and display in the world outside the Internet browser environment. Today, as it was ten years ago, probably 95% of the scientists who use NASA/NOAA (etc.) data sets do so with commercial software products such as Matlab, IDL, ENVI, or ARCgis. These products represent an enormous investment in code. This code is supplemented by shared user code libraries (such as the IDL Astronomy User's Library at GSFC). While new browser-based data access efforts are making real progress as alternative data use portals, there remains a need to help the top commercial and open-source vendor/developers respond to new standards (such as the OGC services) and potentials for interoperability (such as KML export).
We spend hours and weeks and years of our lives struggling with IDL or ARCgis because these packages already solve so many of the problems we encounter connecting to data resources. Even the web-service developers use these to manage data manipulation on the server side. Every now and then (sometimes more often than not) we find ourselves in complete agreement with Jaron.
Bring your data access need/opportunity to this breakout session and join in the discussion on how the CSTI might help the data analysis software you use every day suck less...
As a demonstration of how COTS software can be extended to serve new users, the DIAL technology takes runtime IDL and marries this to Adobe Director (a multimedia software AUTHORING environment) with the aim of creating a data access/analysis/visualization authoring engine that your project/agency can use to create stand-alone applications.
Bruce Caron will give the demo and lead the CSTI discussion.
Issue Breakout 3 - Carbon Cycle Cluster Meeting
Carbon in the atmosphere is increasing because of emissions from power plants and transportation and changes in land cover and land use. The increase in atmospheric carbon, especially carbon dioxide and methane, is the primary contributor to the rise in global temperatures and climate change. Policy decisions are being made now on how to mitigate the changing carbon regime by reducing emissions and increasing carbon sequestration in geologic structures and in terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. Actions taken to reduce emissions and increase or stimulate carbon sequestration assume the capability to measure, monitor and verify the results in the near term and long term. For example, existing carbon trading approaches assume that the amount of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere and stored in forests or agricultural soils can be easily and accurately measured, and that the carbon, once stored, will remain out of the atmosphere indefinitely. Similarly, carbon dioxide scrubbed from the atmosphere or removed from stack emissions and stored underground must be monitored to assure that the carbon is stable and not leaking into the atmosphere.
Tools and systems to assist resource managers make decisions regarding the potential for carbon management and to monitor the results are becoming more prevalent and accurate. These systems usually involve a combination of in situ measurements with geo-spatial and geo-statistical methodologies that extend site specific measurements over large areas. This session will examine issues related to carbon management and consider the goals and objectives for an ESIP Federation cluster – a cluster that would help decision makers implement policies to reduce carbon emissions and facilitate carbon sequestration. Time permitting, the session will also consider expanding the purview of the cluster to regional climatology i.e., how to provide decision makers with information on changes in regional climates in a manner and time frame that would support major decisions on land use, resource management, and other regional planning issues.
Moderator: Ed Sheffner – Deputy Chief, Earth Science Division, NASA Ames Research Center, former Program Manager for Carbon Management, NASA HQ.