Dmitry Mishin

Transparent Data Cube for Spatiotemporal Data Mining and Visualization

Data mining and visualization in very large spatiotemporal databases requires three kinds of computing parallelism: file system, data processor, and visualization or rendering farm. Transparent data cube combines on the same hardware a database cluster for active storage of spatiotemporal data with an MPI compute cluster for data processing and rendering on a tiled-display video wall. This approach results in a scalable and inexpensive architecture for interactive analysis and high-resolution mapping of environmental and remote sensing data which we use for comparative study of the climate and vegetation change.

Integrating and mining distributed environmental archives on Grids

The solar‐terrestrial physics distributed database for the ICSU World Data Centers, and the NCEP/NCAR climate re‐analysis data have been integrated into standard Grid environments using the OGSA‐DAI framework. A set of algorithms and software tools for distributed querying and mining environmental archives using the UNIDATA Common Data Model concepts has been developed. In addition, the toolkit enables querying the data using meaningful ‘human linguistic’ terms. Copyright

VxOware: software for managing virtual observatory metadata

The recent Heliophysics Virtual Observatory (VxO) effort involves the development of separate observatories with a low overlap in physical domain or area of scientific specialization and a high degree of overlap in metadata management needs. VxOware is a content and metadata management system. While it is intended for use by a VxO specifically, it can also be used by any entity that manages structured metadata. VxOware has many features of a content management system and extensively uses the W3C recommendations for XML (Extensible Markup Language), XQuery (XML Query), and XSLT (Extensible Style Sheet Language Transformations). VxOware has features such as system and user administration, search, user-editable content, version tracking, and a wiki. Besides virtual observatories, the intended user-base of VxOware includes a group or an instrument team that has developed a directory structure of data files and would like to make this data, and its associated metadata, available in the virtual observatory network. One of the most powerful features of VxOware is the ability to link any type of object in the observatory to other objects and the ability for every object to be tagged.