GEOSS AIP Response

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

1. Overview
2. Proposed Contributions
   1. Societal Benefit Area Alignment and Support
   2. Component and Service Contributions
      1. Air Quality Community Portal
      2. Air Quality Community Catalog
      3. Air Quality Community DataSpaces
   3. Architecture and Interoperability Arrangement Development
3. Description of Responding Organization

Overview

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.

Because of its multi-organization participation and community-driven nature, the Air Quality Cluster is also 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. 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 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.

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.

Proposed 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: Catalog, Portal and DataSpaces. It is not expected that the AIP will result in a final, polished set of community component but that the effort within Phase II of AIP will define an initial community portal, catalog and dataspace that helps organizations participate in the Pilot and that is subsequently advanced through community contributions.

Component and Service Contributions

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. EIE 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. EIE 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 special portlet, semantic search portlet, is developed to bridge 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. Time-enabled WMS viewer portlet is developed to support the visualization of time varying geographic data, such as air quality. A 3D/4D visualization portlet is developed based on to NASA World Wind. All of these are available to support the proposed Air Quality Architecture Interoperability Pilot for the AQ community portal.

Air Quality Community Catalog

Community catalogs are expected to interface with the broad GEOSS clearinghouse and registries. ESIP has created wiki-based metadata records for air quality related data 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 external access of 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.

Air Quality Community DataSpaces

The ESIP Air Quality Cluster has developed a set of DataSpaces, wiki pages that capture with metadata and contextual information, such as articles that reference a dataset or applications that use a dataset, about air quality datasets. We plan to integrate the DataSpaces so that they are usable by the air quality scenario participants.

Description of Responding Organization

• Current Draft