Geoinformatics, Cyberinfrastructure, and the GEON Project

Geoinformatics is a term that appears to have been independently coined by several groups around the world to describe a variety of efforts to promote collaboration between computer science and the geosciences to solve complex scientific questions. Fostered by the leadership within the National Science Foundation, Geoinformatics has emerged as an initiative within the Earth Sciences Division to address the growing recognition that the Earth functions as a complex system and that existing information science infrastructure and practice used by the geoscience community are inadequate to address the many difficult problems posed by this system. In addition, there is now widespread recognition that successfully addressing these problems requires integrative and innovative approaches to analyzing, modeling, and developing extensive and diverse data sets. Currently, the chaotic distribution of available data sets, lack of documentation about them, and lack of easy-to-use access tools and computer modeling and analysis codes are major obstacles for scientists and educators alike. These obstacles have hindered scientists and educators in the access and full use of available data and information derived from it, and hence have limited scientific productivity and the quality of education. However, recent advances in fields such as computational methods, visualization, and database interoperability provide practical means to overcome such problems.

Earth Science is a discipline that is strongly data driven, and large varied data sets are often developed by researchers and government agencies. However, our community knows all too well the difference between a large data set and a useable database. To be sure, a number of data bases exist, but almost none of them are truly complete, error free as is practical, easily accessible, and simple to use. The ultimate vision of the Geoinformatics initiative is a highly interconnected data system populated with high quality, freely available data, as well as, a robust set of software for analysis, visualization, and modeling. This system would feature rich and deep databases and convenient access.

The development of the capability to construct, organize, and verify an Earth Science data system is a natural, and indeed essential, step for the Earth Sciences to move forward so that we can understand the Earth as a system and meet societal needs. Most Earth Science problems are inherently 4-D (x,y,z,t) in nature involving the subsurface and variation with time. Thus, their solution requires data analysis that is far more complex than provided by traditional geographic information systems (GIS). The extent, complexity, and sometimes primitive form of existing data sets and databases, as well as the need for the optimization of the collection of new data, dictate that only a large, cooperative, well coordinated, and sustained effort will allow the community to attain its scientific goals. With a strong emphasis on ease of access and use, the resulting data system would be a very powerful scientific tool to reveal new relationships in space and time and would be an important resource for students, teachers, the public at large, governmental agencies and industry.

Cyberinfrastructure (see the excerpt from the executive summary of a report from the National Science Foundation's Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure below) is a new term that refers to the information technology infrastructure that is needed to: 1) manage, preserve, and efficiently access the vast amounts of Earth Science data that exist now and the vast data flows that will be coming online as projects such as EarthScope (www.earthscope.org) get underway; 2) foster integrated scientific studies that are required to address the increasingly complex scientific problems that face our scientific community; 3) accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and facilitate innovation; 4) create an environment in which data and software developed with public funds are preserved and made available in a timely fashion; and 5) provide easy access to high-end computational power, visualization and open source software to researchers and students. The task of creating a cyberinfrastructure for the Earth Sciences is daunting due to the large volume and diversity of the data, as well as, the extreme differences in data formats, storage and computing systems, as well as differing conventions, terminologies, and ontological frameworks across disciplines. One way to think about this is that the ultimate goal is provide one with the tools and data needed to do better, more creative science by minimizing the effort needed to look for data, research the background of a topic, and make software run properly. Another consideration is that when data and information are entered into an organized system, they can be easily found and unexpected relationships can be discovered via queries in "Google-like" fashion. An earth scientist should think in terms of discovering many of the relationships between phenomena that led to plate tectonics in days instead of years.

In addition to the Southwest GeoNet project, a small Information Technology Research (ITR) project that is a partnership between the University of Texas at El Paso and Arizona State University, a large ITR grant funds the GEON (GEOscience Network) project. The focus of GEON is the pressing need in the geosciences to: 1) craft the many relatively raw data sets in the Earth Science community into mature databases that can grow and evolve; 2) interlink and share these multidisciplinary databases; 3) create a robust toolbox of open source software for analysis, modeling, and visualization; and 4) provide the information technology infrastructure to manage and explore a highly distributed and diverse network. GEON is a true partnership between Computer Science and Earth Science researchers, and the scientific goal of this project is to facilitate efforts to understand complex problems focusing on the 4-D structure and evolution of continents. To rise to this challenge, we formed a coalition of researchers with key Computer Science expertise and researchers representing a broad cross-section of Earth Science sub-disciplines. The creation of GEON is a first step in developing the critical cyberinfrastructure necessary to achieve the vision of Geoinformatics and facilitate other research initiatives, in particular EarthScope. GEON is working closely with organizations such IRIS, the U. S. Geological Survey, SCEC, and UNAVCO as well as other IT efforts within the Earth Science community. In particular, the U. S. Geological Survey has joined as a major partner and has made creation of key GEON-related databases a priority effort over the next several years.

Creating the GEON cyberinfrastructure to integrate, analyze, and model 4D data poses fundamental IT research challenges due to the extreme heterogeneity of geoscience data formats, storage and computing systems and, most importantly, the ubiquity of "hidden semantics" and differing conventions, terminologies, and ontological frameworks across disciplines. As the prototype for a national cyberinfrastructure in the geosciences, our guiding principle is embracing heterogeneity at all levels-hardware, software, networking, as well as information structures. Creating this infrastructure involves basic as well as applied research in Information Technology and use of state-of-the-art information technologies. GEON IT research focuses on modeling, indexing, semantic mediation, and visualization of multi-scale 4D data, and creation of a prototype GEON Grid. An important contribution will be embarking on the definition of a Unified Geosciences Language System (UGLS), to enable semantic interoperability. For example, a stratigraphic layer of rock often changes names across state lines, and think of all the possible answers to a "Google-like" query about the age of a ock unit or the magnitude of an earthquake and of all the places where one might find this information. We will create a portal to provide access to the GEON environment, which will include advanced query interfaces to distributed, semantically-integrated databases, Web-enabled access to shared tools, and seamless access to distributed computational, storage, and visualization resources and data archives. Various GEON-like grid efforts, such as GriPhyN, NEESGrid, NBII, and BIRN, all indicate the readiness of the Computer Science community to provide the necessary interoperable infrastructure, and testify to the value of integration of Computer Science with major science and education initiatives.

In order to insure that the scope of GEON was manageable, linkage and refinement of existing and emerging databases is being emphasized, and two testbeds (the mid-Atlantic and Rocky Mountain region) were identified to focus the GEON geoscience research effort geographically. These regions were selected due to the variety of geological issues embodied within them that require integration of multi- disciplinary database, and because they are areas of expertise for the GEON geoscience research team. The ultimate goal of GEON research is to significantly impact large multi-scale geoscience research programs such as Earthscope, as well as individuals and smaller groups of researchers with the goal of facilitating the development of a culture in which data are shared, archived and rapidly disseminated across our discipline, much like IRIS has done within seismology. Many disciplinary geoscience database projects are already underway, indicating the readiness of the community to participate in such a national-scale effort. By facilitating the use of large and diverse data sets, we believe that the scientific community will make major scientific discoveries and create new and exciting scientific paradigms that lead is into the post-plate tectonics era.

In the case of both test beds, our goal is to pursue an ambitious research agenda in Earth Science stressing integrated studies while working with Computer Science colleagues to create a cyberinfrastructure that pushes the envelop in their field. We hope to create an environment in which researchers will be able to see benefits for their personal efforts and will want to contribute data, software, and ideas.

Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure

This is the final report of a Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, a panel of experts formed and charged by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate to evaluate current major investments in cyberinfrastructure and its use, to recommend new areas of emphasis relevant to cyberinfrastructure, and to propose an implementation plan for pursuing them. We carried out this charge through individual interactions with researchers, surveys, testimony, review of prior relevant reports, requests for comments, participation in workshops, and extensive deliberation.

The Panel's overarching finding is that a new age has dawned in scientific and engineering research, pushed by continuing progress in computing, information, and communication technology, and pulled by the expanding complexity, scope, and scale of today's challenges. The capacity of this technology has crossed thresholds that now make possible a comprehensive "cyberinfrastructure" on which to build new types of scientific and engineering knowledge environments and organizations and to pursue research in new ways and with increased efficacy.

Such environments and organizations, enabled by cyberinfrastructure, are increasingly required to address national and global priorities, such as understanding global climate change, protecting our natural environment, applying genomics-proteomics to human health, maintaining national security, mastering the world of nanotechnology, and predicting and protecting against natural and human disasters, as well as to address some of our most fundamental intellectual questions such as the formation of the universe and the fundamental character of matter.

The Panel's overarching recommendation is that the National Science Foundation should establish and lead a large-scale, interagency, and internationally coordinated Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Program (ACP) to create, deploy, and apply cyberinfrastructure in ways that radically empower all scientific and engineering research and allied education. We estimate that sustained new NSF funding of $1 billion per year is needed to achieve critical mass and to leverage the coordinated co-investment from other federal agencies, universities, industry, and international sources necessary to empower a revolution. The cost of not acting quickly or at a subcritical level could be high, both in opportunities lost and in increased fragmentation and balkanization of the research communities.