IN44A-01 INVITED
The NASA Forecast Model Web Map Service
The NASA Forecast Model WMS (NFMW) provides on-demand visualizations of Earth science data. The current usage focuses on field campaigns and other projects that use the output of the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) and Weather Research Framework (WRF) models, but other models can be supported. The NFMW implements the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) interoperability specification. WMS provisions for handling time and other dimensions are used extensively to support the multi-dimensional nature of the forecast data. Scientists and other interested parties access the WMS using a variety of clients including our own web-based Viewer, Google Earth, a multi-screen Hyperwall installation, or other WMS-compliant applications. We have found that offering an open-standard interface to our data collection has simplified usage of the data and has permitted users to visualize the data from remote locations using only a web browser. The NFMW and Viewer may be accessed at http://map.nasa.gov/tools.html. The NFMW software is available as open source, and is written in a combination of Perl and Interactive Data Language (IDL). This work is supported by the Geosciences Interoperability Office (GIO) and the Modeling and Analysis Program (MAP) at NASA. http://map.nasa.gov/tools.html
IN44A-02
Distributed Multi-interface Catalogue for Geospatial Data
Several geosciences communities (e.g. atmospheric science, oceanography, hydrology) have developed tailored data and metadata models and service protocol specifications for enabling online data discovery, inventory, evaluation, access and download. These specifications are conceived either profiling geospatial information standards or extending the well-accepted geosciences data models and protocols in order to capture more semantics. These artifacts have generated a set of related catalog -and inventory services- characterizing different communities, initiatives and projects. In fact, these geospatial data catalogs are discovery and access systems that use metadata as the target for query on geospatial information. The indexed and searchable metadata provide a disciplined vocabulary against which intelligent geospatial search can be performed within or among communities. There exists a clear need to conceive and achieve solutions to implement interoperability among geosciences communities, in the context of the more general geospatial information interoperability framework. Such solutions should provide search and access capabilities across catalogs, inventory lists and their registered resources. Thus, the development of catalog clearinghouse solutions is a near-term challenge in support of fully functional and useful infrastructures for spatial data (e.g. INSPIRE, GMES, NSDI, GEOSS). This implies the implementation of components for query distribution and virtual resource aggregation. These solutions must implement distributed discovery functionalities in an heterogeneous environment, requiring metadata profiles harmonization as well as protocol adaptation and mediation. We present a catalog clearinghouse solution for the interoperability of several well-known cataloguing systems (e.g. OGC CSW, THREDDS catalog and data services). The solution implements consistent resource discovery and evaluation over a dynamic federation of several well-known cataloguing and inventory systems. Prominent features include: 1)Support to distributed queries over a hierarchical data model, supporting incremental queries (i.e. query over collections, to be subsequently refined) and opaque/translucent chaining; 2)Support to several client protocols, through a compound front-end interface module. This allows to accommodate a (growing) number of cataloguing standards, or profiles thereof, including the OGC CSW interface, ebRIM Application Profile (for Core ISO Metadata and other data models), and the ISO Application Profile. The presented catalog clearinghouse supports both the opaque and translucent pattern for service chaining. In fact, the clearinghouse catalog may be configured either to completely hide the underlying federated services or to provide clients with services information. In both cases, the clearinghouse solution presents a higher level interface (i.e. OGC CSW) which harmonizes multiple lower level services (e.g. OGC CSW, WMS and WCS, THREDDS, etc.), and handles all control and interaction with them. In the translucent case, client has the option to directly access the lower level services (e.g. to improve performances). In the GEOSS context, the solution has been experimented both as a stand-alone user application and as a service framework. The first scenario allows a user to download a multi-platform client software and query a federation of cataloguing systems, that he can customize at will. The second scenario support server-side deployment and can be flexibly adapted to several use-cases, such as intranet proxy, catalog broker, etc.
IN44A-03
Mashup of Tools through Interoperability Standards RSS, RDF, KML and XSL
Considerable effort is being devoted to the development, and testing of interoperability standards for data access, such as the OGC Web Services WMS/WCS/WFS. The federated data system, DataFed, developed as a broad partnership utilizes these data access standards to deliver a rich array of quantitative air quality and geospatial data to any client application. Recent advances in standardization also allow the linking of distributed applications through the exchange of additional data types: (1)The Really Simple Syndication (RSS) standard facilitates the exchange of simple text records (e.g. annotated bookmarks); (2) The Resource Description Framework (RDF) standard allows the formal description of semantically rich data structures; (3) The Google Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is the standard way to encode/render geospatial data and metadata; (4) The EMBED standard facilitates the incorporation of web content from one server into the web page hosted on another server. Use of these standards now permits the easy creation of user-defined application "mashups" that transform/integrate various data/metadata streams. Wikis, originally used to collaboratively write documents, are now also used as a host for integrating mashups of this type. In this paper, we will illustrate these application mashups. We will show an example where the wiki host receives RSS feeds from Del.icio.us, blogs, etc. A semantically enhanced wiki is used to create and manage structured metadata, which then can be shared through the RDF standard feed. Content from Google Maps, videos from YouTube, PPT slides from SlideShare are also integrated into wiki pages through the EMBED standard. Mashups between the DataFed data access system, the wiki and GoogleEarth using KML, XSL and RDF will also be demonstrated.
IN44A-04
Highlights and Conclusions of the Unidata OGC Interoperability Day
At the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) Technical Committee meetings, Unidata hosted a special Interoperability Day workshop to address the use of web services via standard interfaces for accessing a broad range of environmental data. These interfaces include: WCS (Web Coverage Service), WFS (Web Feature Service, SOS (Sensor Observation Service, CS-W/ebRIM (Catalog Service for the Web / electronic business Registry Information Model) for providing access to data currently served via THREDDS (THematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services), OPeNDAP (Open source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol), netCDF-CF (network Common Data Form - Climate and Forecast conventions) and IDD/LDM (Internet Data Distribution / Local Data Manager) technologies. The primary data served includes weather, climate and ocean data from the community sometimes referred to as Fluid Earth Sciences (FES). An international set of representatives from industry, government, and academia, spanning many geosciences disciplines participated actively in the workshop and are committed to continued collaboration. The overall objective for the day was to come up with practical and concrete ideas for how to deliver various classes of FES data via web services through the standard interfaces. The primary focus was on gridded datasets (e.g., forecast model output) and station/observation/point datasets (e.g. the observational data collected at weather stations, ocean buoys, river gaging stations. As time allowed, other categories (profile/trajectory, swath, radial, unstructured grids) were addressed. The main objective was to come up with a realistic plan for dealing with gridded and station/observation/point datasets. Then the remaining categories can be addressed incrementally. This presentation summarizes the highlights of the Interoperability Day and the resulting plans for future implementation and testing. http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/events/2007InteroperabilityDay/
IN44A-05 INVITED
Marine Interoperability Efforts and Standards: What's Missing?
A review of the world of interoperable data systems for earth science shows progress on many fronts. How close is real, practical, and pervasive interoperability? Which aspects are going well, which are muddling along, and which are lagging? This talk will visit current work on marine data systems, and the parts of interoperability that are, and are not, addressed. We will consider the standards, resources, and services that aid data and metadata exchange for data files and data streams, and characterize their role in an overall interoperable framework. From this baseline, immediate needs will be assessed, and some attempt to predict future directions will be made. http://marinemetadata.org/agumarineinterop
IN44A-06
CHRONOS's Examples of Application of Standards to REST Services
We will present the approach that CHRONOS is using to exchange data with third party web sites and applications based on Representational State Transfer (REST) services. REST allows for the simple creation of services by associating documents with URL's in a manner similar to traditional web sites, where user- generated requests return data usually encoded in HTML. We will show the use of the Web Application Description Language (WADL) to address issues of REST service description. Then, by combining these REST services with XML documents and Microformats, we provide a standards-based approach to the delivery of services and data. These REST-style services facilitate external use thanks to the use of traditional web-style request/response structure. We will present an example of an application that delivers age models from ODP's Janus database to both web-based and stand-alone client applications (e.g., GeoMapApp). The network-accessible CHRONOS infrastructure is designed around a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA), in which all of the functionality is exposed as discrete services. These services can be combined to create new services and consumed both internally, by tools in the toolkit and portal interfaces, and externally by other groups for their own efforts and tasks. This service-based approach has reduced the time it takes the CHRONOS IT team to turn a feature request from the community into a production-caliber tool or portal interface. A common theme throughout the CHRONOS architecture is the use of XML for describing services, data, and metadata. XML is a simple, standard text format that enjoys widespread adoption and support across all platforms, making it a natural choice in an open architecture. CHRONOS employs several community-developed and supported XML schemas for representing time scale, GIS, and other data. The presentation will emphasize the added importance of the utilization of XML because of the free-form nature of REST services, and the combination with Microformats, which include extractable concepts into the body of the returned document. http://www.chronos.org
IN44A-07
NASA's Earth Science Data Systems Standards Process
The purpose of NASA's Standards Process Group (SPG) is to provide recommendations to NASA management on ways to evolve and improve Earth Data Systems through the endorsement of Earth science data systems standards. SPG's goal is to facilitate broader use of standards that have proven implementation and operational benefit to NASA Earth science by facilitating the approval of proposed standards and directing the evolution of standards. We have found that the candidate standards that self defined communities are proposing for endorsement to the SPG are one of 4 types: (1) A NASA community developed standard used within at least one self defined community where the proposed standard has not been approved or adopted by an external standards organization and where new implementations are expected to be developed from scratch, using the proposed standard as the implementation specification; (2) A NASA community developed standard used within at least one self defined community where the proposed standard has not been approved or adopted by an external standards organization and where new implementations are not expected to be developed from scratch but use existing software libraries or code;. (3) A standard already approved by an external standards organization but is being proposed for use for the NASA Earth science community; (4) A defacto standard already widely used. SPG's standards process has been revised to provide a comprehensive but not a redundant review of the proposed standard. We will discuss real examples of the different types of candidate standards that have been proposed and endorsed (i.e. OPeNDAP's Data Access Protocol, Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Map Server, and the Hierarchical Data Format). We will discuss the potential defacto standards (Google's KML, Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) Directory Interchange Format (DIF), GeoTIFF file format) that could be identified and endorsed through our revised Standards Process in the future. We will discuss the issues with the original Standards Process that arose, and the modifications to the Standards Process that we are envisioning as a result of our experience. http://www.esdswg.org/spg
IN44A-08
The EarthScope Portal
The EarthScope Portal is being developed in order to provide a unified, single-point of access to EarthScope data products from USArray, PBO, and SAFOD experiments. The portal will feature basic search and data access capabilities to allow users to discover and access EarthScope data using spatial, temporal, and other metadata- based search conditions. In this presentation, we will describe the features and design of the portal, which is being developed by a team consisting of GEON (Geosciences Network, http://www.geongrid.org), IRIS, UNAVCO, and Stanford. The portal search module invokes Web services developed by IRIS, UNAVCO, and Stanford to search for EarthScope data in the archives at each of these locations. The Web services provide information about all resources (data) that match the specified search conditions. Users will be able to select from the returned data sets, add selected data to a "data cart", and request the selected data to be packaged for download to the user. The initial services being defined are for "station discovery", to find which stations are available for specified spatial and temporal bounds, and "data discovery", to find the data sets that are available from the stations. Users will subsequently be able to choose the specific datasets, which will be assembled in a user "workspace" and available for download. The EarthScope Portal leverages the significant portal development efforts of the GEON Project at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, SDSC (http://portal.geongrid.org), and the development of Web services interfaces at the three data archive facilities. The portal is implemented using the open source GridSphere portal software infrastructure which supports the well-known Java portlet interface, viz. JSR 168 or the Portlet API. It uses a set of "core" portlets that have been developed in GEON for Data Registration, Search, and Workspace Services. We will provide a report on the current state of development of the Portal. A preliminary deployment of the portal software has been done on systems at SDSC; initial design has been done for the StationDiscovery and DataDiscovery services; and IRIS, UNAVCO, and Stanford have begun implementation of early version of the corresponding Web services which will run on servers at their respective locations. An early demonstration of this capability will be provided at the AGU meeting.
IN44A-09
GEOSS Registry System: Enabling the Registering and Discovering of Geospatial Web Services Worldwide
Web Service registry, as a key infrastructural component and cornerstone for Service-Oriented-Architecture deployments, meets the critical need to register, discover, and govern available Web services that provide a promising plan to promote the online discovering and sharing of massive valuable geospatial data. The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Registry System includes mechanisms to register components and have them approved by the GEO Secretariat, to register services and associate them with GEOSS-recognized standards -- and special arrangements for implementations using non-recognized approaches. A taxonomy of standard types is also proposed to assist in the discovery and classification of GEOSS service implementations. This GEOSS registry exposes Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), OASIS ebXML-ebRS, and OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) Catalogue Service for Web (CSW) interfaces to be accessed by other applications, including GEOSS Web Portal solutions. Clearinghouse implementations can use the GEOSS registry to register and locate GEOSS catalog services as a basis for evaluation, configuration, harvest, and distributed query. The details of the system design and implementation will be presented, along with the lessons learned from this effort to promote the discovery and system integration of geospatial Web Services worldwide. http://uddi.csiss.gmu.edu/index.htm