HR: 08:50h
AN: U21A-04    [PDF]
TI: GEON: Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences
AU: * Seber, D
EM: seber@sdsc.edu
AF: San Diego Supercomputer Center, 9500 Gilman Dr. MC 0505, La Jolla, CA 92093 United States
AU: Keller, R
EM: keller@geo.utep.edu
AF: University of Texas at El Paso, Geological Sciences, El Paso, TX 79902 United States
AU: Sinha, K
EM: pitlab@vt.edu
AF: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Geological Sciences, Blacksburg, CA 24061 United States
AU: Baru, C
EM: baru@sdsc.edu
AF: San Diego Supercomputer Center, 9500 Gilman Dr. MC 0505, La Jolla, CA 92093 United States
AB: The GEON (GEOscience Network) is a multi-disciplinary research initiative conducted jointly by earth and computer scientists aimed at developing a cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences. GEON has been developed in response to the pressing needs in the geosciences to interlink and share multidisciplinary data sets and tools to understand the complex dynamics of Earth systems. The creation of GEON will provide the critical infrastructure necessary to facilitate much needed collaborative interdisciplinary earth science research. As earth sciences are going through major changes and headed towards integrating interdisciplinary data and knowledge for scientific discovery processes, geoscientists have realized that current systems to conduct such interdisciplinary research are extremely inadequate. In addition to technical difficulties, cultural barriers among earth science disciplines also hinder progress. GEON is designed to alleviate these problems by creating an infrastructure and a cultural environment to enable collaboration and scientific discoveries. Creating such a cyberinfrastructure to integrate, analyze, and model 4D geoscience data poses fundamental IT research challenges due to the extreme heterogeneity of geoscience data formats, storage and computing systems and, most importantly, the ubiquity of hidden semantic and differing conventions, terminologies, and ontological frameworks across disciplines. Integrating data sets at semantic levels and providing users information about data sets, tools, and other resources at the "concept" level will provide unprecedented opportunities for research and education. Researchers will be able to access and utilize, with minimal effort, data and tools from an allied discipline. In its cyberinfrastructure efforts GEON is using grid technology. Grids are designed to provide sustainable and distributed architecture to enable seamless access to data sets and computational resources over the Internet using secure links and connections. The GEONgrid and the grid portal are being built as open source platforms allowing the community to develop their own tools and access mechanisms. As test cases earth science research in GEON is focused on two regions: the Rocky Mountains and the Mid-Atlantic region. The topics being studied in each area are intracontinental deformation and Terrane recognition and analysis, respectively. The GEONgrid can be accessed at http://www.geongrid.org/
UR: http://www.geongrid.org
DE: 7200 SEISMOLOGY
DE: 8000 STRUCTURAL GEOLOGY (New field, replaces single entry 8165)
DE: 8100 TECTONOPHYSICS
DE: 9350 North America
SC: U
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting