Philip Bogden

Architecture of a Community Infrastructure for Predicting and Analyzing Coastal Inundation

The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) has advanced the SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) program as a multi-institution collaboration to design and prototype a modular, distributed system for real-time prediction and visualization of the coastal impacts from extreme atmospheric events, including hurricane inundation and waves. The SCOOP program vision is a community “cyberinfrastructure” that enables advances in the science of environmental prediction and coastal hazard planning. The system architecture is a coordinated and distributed network of interoperable, modularized components that include numerical models, information catalogs, distributed archives, computing resources, and network infrastructure. The components are linked over the Internet by standardized web-service interfaces in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The design philosophy allows geographically disparate partnering institutions to provide complementary data-provider and integration services. The overall system enables coordinated sharing of resources, tools, and ideas among a virtual community of coastal and computer scientists. The distributed design builds on the notion that standards enable innovation, and seeks to leverage successes of the World Wide Web by creating an environment that nurtures interaction between the research community, the private sector, and government agencies working together on behalf of the nation.

Web feature service (WFS) and sensor observation service (SOS) comparison to publish time series data

Communities that want to share information often do not know enough about the available standards or how to choose the best one. One is example is marine communities that want to share observation data. Even selecting a standards body, such as the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), is not enough. For example, OGC has more than one standard that could potentially be used to publish time series data: Sensor Observation Service (SOS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS). To better assess these standards requires testing and evaluation in end-to-end demonstrations. An end-to end prototype spans from publishing sensor deployment information to visualizing in a web client data from a remote web service. OOSTethys is a community initiative that has been advancing standardized components in end-to-end prototypes for marine observations. OOSTethys participants initiated an OGC Ocean Science Interoperability Experiment (Oceans IE) in 2007, to advance the interoperability of ocean observing systems by using OGC standards. The Oceans IE Phase I investigated the use of WFS and SOS for representing and exchanging point data records from fixed in-situ marine platforms. The study found that 1) SOS contains the necessary components to represent observations, not only from sensors, but also from sensor systems; 2) communities that adopt SOS instead of WFS will not be required to create and maintain their own specifications, which specify the rules of encoding, such as XML Schemas; and, 3) the SOS model and weak typing approach provides a sufficient balance to allow general structure and community semantics to co-exist; however, this requires an effort in creating and maintaining controlled vocabularies by marine communities. The result is not only relevant to the marine community but to any community that is sharing geo-spatial observations.

Instrument interface standards for interoperable ocean sensor networks

The utility and cost-effectiveness of instrument networks are enhanced by instrument interoperability. Todays oceanographic instruments are characterized by very diverse non-standard software protocols and data formats. This diversity of protocols poses serious challenges to integration of large-scale sensor networks. Standard instrument protocols are now being developed to address these challenges. Some of these standards apply at the IP-network level and enable integration of existing “lower level” proprietary instrument protocols and software components. Other approaches are intended to be implemented by the instrument device itself. These native instrument protocol standards offer the possibility of more uniform and simpler system architectures. We compare these various approaches, describe how they can be combined with one another, and describe some prototypes that implement them.

'Marine metadata interoperability project: leading to collaboration

The marine metadata interoperability project is halfway through its first year of marine metadata and community development. In that time it has established Steering and Technical Committees, developed a collaborative Web site with many hundreds of references and an active membership, and initiated a domain vocabulary mapping project and demonstration development effort. We describe the projects international collaboration and results to date, and suggest that metadata is an admirable starting point for collaborations between other science projects.

The SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction Program (SCOOP) Service-Oriented Architecture

The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction Program (SCOOP) is a multi-institution collaboration whose partners are working to implement a modular, distributed system for real-time prediction and visualization of the impacts of extreme atmospheric events, including storm surge and wind-driven waves. SCOOP Program partners are developing an interoperable network of modularized components (numerical models, information catalogs, distributed archives, computing resources and network infrastructure) linked by standardized interfaces. This service-oriented architecture (SOA) is emerging as a prototype open access, distributed virtual laboratory for oceanographic research and coastal applications. The SOA approach allows data integration from multiple platforms and enables the exchange of resources, tools, and ideas among a virtual community. The SOA framework consists of five layers: (1) a user interface; (2) an application and tools layer; (3) a management layer; (4) a resource access layer; and (5) physical resources all linked by cross-cutting services. The SOA layer components support several different use cases because they can be configured into a variety of workflows

SCOOP Data Management: A Standards-based Distributed System for Coastal Data and Modeling

The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) coastal ocean observing and prediction (SCOOP) program is a SURA Coastal Research initiative that is deploying cutting edge information technology to advance the science of environmental prediction and hazard planning for our nations coasts. SCOOP is a distributed program, incorporating heterogeneous data, software and hardware; thus the use of standards to enable interoperability is key to SCOOPs success. Standards activities range from internal coordination among SCOOP partners to participation in national standards efforts. As the lead partner in the SCOOP program for both data management and data translation, the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) is developing a suite of advanced technologies to provide core data and information management services for scientific data, including the SCOOP Catalog and a suite of standards-based web services providing Catalog access. Currently under development is a web service that will export information on SCOOP data collections in a schema compliant with the Federal Geographic Data Committees Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata. SCOOP is also a participant in the OpenlOOS Interoperability Demonstration, which leverages open geospatial consortium (OGQ standards such as the Web map service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) protocols to display near real time coastal observations together with water level, wave, and surge forecasts. SCOOP partners are also active participants in several data and metadata standards efforts, including the national ocean sciences data management and communications metadata studies and the marine metadata interoperability project. Continued close cooperation between the IT and coastal science modeling communities is producing positive results toward a real-time modeling environment that will benefit coastal stakeholders through better predictive capabilities.

SCOOP Data Management: A Standards-Based Distributed Information System for Coastal Data Management

The Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA) Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP – http://scoop.sura.org) program is a SURA Coastal Research initiative that is deploying cutting edge IT to advance the science of environmental prediction and hazard planning for our nation’s coasts. SCOOP is intended as a working prototype infrastructure to serve as a model for a distributed Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) in the southeastern region (Bogden and Graves 2005). IOOS is a national initiative to create a new system for collecting and disseminating information about the oceans. The system will support a variety of practical applications, along with enabling research.

Cost and User Profile of a Coastal Ocean Observing System

Fundamental to sustaining the financial support of a coastal ocean observing system is an intimate knowledge of users and their decision-making processes in order to maximize the worth of ocean observations to them. This article explores the evolving mission of GoMOOS (the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System), its costs of providing near real-time observations and observing products, possible methods to assess the benefits of an ocean observing system, and a method for indexing the importance—and thus, potentially, the economic value—that users attach to these observations and products.

Designing a Dynamic Data Driven Application System for Coastal and Environmental Modeling

The economically important Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) is susceptible to hurricane activity which is increasingly aggravated by the continuing erosion of wetlands. Various programs are aimed at building sophisticated models of meteorological, coastal, and ecological processes. The emerging paradigm of Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) can be applied to these models leading to new scenarios for integrated, real-time simulations that include feedback control with sensors and simulations. This paper describes the motivation and components for a comprehensive DDDAS for coastal and environmental modeling and the implications this has for scientific libraries and high performance computing.

Implementing and sustaining an end-to-end coastal observing system: Lessons learned — GoMOOS

GoMOOS, the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System, was initially conceived in 1998 as a new, multi-institution research organization devoted to remotely sensing, interpreting, and modeling the physical and biological conditions of a productive and heavily exploited marginal sea. However, by the time of its formal founding in 1999, its mission had evolved from one of a research organization to one of a service organization - essentially a cooperative utility that would provide data and data products on a 24/7 basis to a wide range of end users, including but not exclusively or even primarily researchers. Now completing its sixth year, including five years of continuous, hourly data reporting from 10 buoys (and, more recently, high frequency radar stations) around the Gulf of Maine, the evolution of GoMOOSs mission continues. It increasingly views itself as the catalyst for a distributed system of predictions relating to the marine environment. This system bridges research and operations, and seeks interoperability and synergies among a wide array of oceanographic, biological, and geological players in the marine environment. The combination of new data acquisition, both for real time and archived applications, and of progressive data management for the purpose of interoperability among many institutions with distributed ocean observations, is central to the strategy to sustain an ocean observing system in the Gulf of Maine.