John Graybeal

Cyberinfrastructure for the US Ocean Observatories Initiative

The US National Science Foundations Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is an environmental observatory covering a diversity of oceanic environments, ranging from the coastal to the deep ocean. The key integrating element of the OOI is a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure (CI) that is a substantial departure from previous approaches that will have a significant impact on oceanography over the next twenty years. This paper provides a high-level overview of the CI architecture, as well as the integration and deployment strategies that will ensure its success.

OCean Observatories Initiative Scientific Data Model

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) through its Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Implementing Organization is developing a next generation platform for ocean sciences that will integrate a wide variety of information resources at scales unattainable before in the earth and ocean sciences. We introduce a novel scientific data model that enables distributed, large-scale storage and query of science data. Our model is built on multiple levels of abstraction ranging from domain-specific at the top down to encodings for message-oriented transport and persistence at the base. The key is exposing the properties of scientific feature types separately from the underlying structure of the data, which in turn is separated from their representation. The data representation is further isolated from the serialization and encoding used for transport and persistence. Our model greatly simplifies expressions of provenance and versioning of various data entities. It is robust, scalable and reliable. We implemented it for the first release of the OOI Integrated Observatory Network (ION), with rollout to operations currently underway.

Building transparent data access for ocean observatories: Coordination of U.S. IOOS DMAC with NSF's OOI Cyberinfrastructure

The NOAA-led U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and the National Science Foundations Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) have been collaborating since 2007 on advanced tools and technologies that ensure open access to ocean observations and models. Initial collaboration focused on serving ocean data via cloud computing - a key component of the OOI cyberinfrastructure (CI) architecture. As the OOI transitioned from planning to execution in the Fall of 2009, an OOI/IOOS team developed a customer-based “use case” to align more closely with the emerging objectives of OOI-CI teams first software release scheduled for Summer 2011 and provide a quantitative capacity for stress-testing these tools and protocols. A requirements process was initiated with coastal modelers, focusing on improved workflows to deliver ocean observation data. Accomplishments to date include the documentation and assessment of scientific workflows for two “early adopter” modeling teams from IOOS Regional partners (Rutgers - the State University of New Jersey and University of Hawaiis School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology) to enable full understanding of data sources and needs; generation of all-inclusive lists of the data sets required and those obtainable through IOOS; a more complete understanding of areas where IOOS can expand data access capabilities to better serve the needs of the modeling community; and development of “data set agents” (software) to facilitate data acquisition from numerous data providers and conversions of the data format to the OOI-CI canonical form.