HR: 09:15h
AN: IN31A-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Emerging Systems of Systems for Environmental Data
AU: * Middleton, D E
EM: don@ucar.edu
AF: National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1850 Table Mesa Dr., Boulder, CO 80305, United States
AU: Fox, P
EM: pfox@ucar.edu
AF: National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1850 Table Mesa Dr., Boulder, CO 80305, United States
AU: Cinquini, L
EM: luca@ucar.edu
AF: National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1850 Table Mesa Dr., Boulder, CO 80305, United States
AU: Burek, M
EM: mburek@ucar.edu
AF: National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1850 Table Mesa Dr., Boulder, CO 80305, United States
AB: The scientific research community increasingly has complex, difficult questions to ask of its observations and model results - questions that will increasingly span disparate datasets, multiple disciplines, and international boundaries. Our future information systems are going to need to satisfy these growing demands. GEOSS, the Global Earth Observing System of Systems, puts forth a compelling vision in this area. Solid steps in the direction of this vision are already well underway, moving us towards the next generation of global, federated environmental data systems. For example, last year the World Meteorological Organization demonstrated its first prototype for WIS, the WMO Information System. WIS is a step in the direction of GEOSS, providing a federated system that provides aggregation of environmental data and services at national and regional levels, combined with a small number of redundant peer systems that can service large-scale geographical regions. Forming a foundational layer for efforts like WIS, the global community is in the process of building other systems of systems that essentially aggregate and integrate the output of data and modeling efforts, in areas such as weather, climate, space physics, and many others. This encouraging trend towards federation of new and existing systems is driven by scientific needs and underpinned by shared technology, interfaces, protocols, metadata standards, and the world of Grid computing. NCAR, working with many partners, is contributing to a number of projects that are focused upon some of these challenges. In this presentation we will describe a suite of complimentary and interconnected efforts, including the Earth System Grid (climate), the Community Data Portal (and WIS connections), TIGGE (weather), the Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory, and related metadata thrusts. The main emphasis here is the pursuit of systems of systems as well as progress towards semantic integration, which will be very important if we are to pursue our long-term scientific goals.
DE: 0525 Data management
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly