Versioned geoscientific workflow for the collaborative geo-simulation of human-nature interactions – a case study of global change and human activities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Global change refers to changes in the relationship between humans and nature. It is desirable to actively integrate human social activities into the unified framework of global change so that their mutual relations and functional mechanisms can be understood. This complicated issue necessitates an appropriate method allowing domain experts to collaboratively contribute their knowledge to geoscientific research. Also, an efficient approach to optimize experimentation is of great importance. The reproducibility of research methods and results needs to be improved to boost the sharing of geographic knowledge and resources. This paper proposes a versioned geoscientific workflow and characterizes its full lifecycle using Virtual Geographic Environments, intending to facilitate and improve research related to the interactions between global change and human activities. The geoscientific workflow management is realized using the concept of version management, making geographic simulation methods and computational results easily reproducible and extendable. The sharing and reuse of geographic knowledge in various forms are archived through version management of geoscientific workflows. A versatile prototype system is implemented which enables the visual modeling of geoscientific workflows, the interactive optimization and collaborative evaluation of geoscientific workflows at runtime, the multi-dimensional dynamic visualization of geo-workflow outputs, and role-based access control for data security.