HR: 16:35h
AN: IN24A-03    [Abstracts]
TI: The World Data Fabric: A New Concept for Geophysical Data Collection and Dissemination
AU: * Papitashvili, V
EM: papita@umich.edu
AF: Space Physics Research Laboratory, University of Michigan, 2455 Hayward Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2143 United States
AU: Papitashvili, N
EM: natasha@mail630.gsf.nasa.gov
AF: Space Physics Data Facility and QSS Group Inc., NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AB: Nowadays, a multitude of digital geophysical data have become available via the World Wide Web from a variety of sources, including the World Data Centers (WDC), their suppliers (discipline-specific observatories, research institutions, government agencies), and short-lived, sporadic datasets produced by individual investigators from their research grants. As a result, worldwide geophysical databases become diverse and distributed, urging for sophisticated search engines capable of identifying discipline-specific data on the Web and then retrieving requested intervals for scientific analyses or practical applications. Here we introduce a concept of the World Data Fabric (WDF) emerged from the essence of World Data Centers system that successfully served geophysical communities since the International Geophysical Year (1957-58). We propose to unify both components of the WDC System - data centers and data providers - into a worldwide data network (data fabric), where the WDC role would become more proactive through their direct interaction with the data producers. It suggested that the World Data Centers would become a backbone of the World Data Fabric, watching and copying newly ``Webbed'' geophysical data to the center archives - to preserve at least 2-3 copies (or as many as Centers exist) of the new datasets within the entire WDF. Thus, the WDF would become a self-organized system of the data nodes (providers) and data portals (the WDCs as``clearinghouse''). The WDF would be then developing similarly to the Web, but its focus would be on geophysical data rather than on the content of a specific geophysical discipline. Introducing the WDF concept, we face a number of challenges: (a) data providers should make their datasets available via the Internet using open (but secure) access protocols; (b) multiple copies of every dataset would spread across WDF; (c) every WDF dataset (original or copied) must be digitally signed by the data providers and then by the data copiers; and (c) the WDF datasets must be protected from deliberate corruption or hacking. As the WDF (for all or specific geophysical disciplines) is established and actively maintained by a series of policies and regulations (i.e., specific for a particular discipline) through the WDC activities, then one can write a specific middleware to retrieve required data from the ``data fabric'', building then either the specific Virtual Observatory or Distributed Data System. The presentation will address these challenges suggesting some immediate and intervening solutions.
UR: http://mist.engin.umich.edu/vgmo/vgmo.html
DE: 0525 Data management
DE: 0530 Data presentation and visualization
DE: 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings)
DE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005