Today, access to information is often less of a problem than our ability to discover, process and use it.  Geoscience currently lacks a sustainable cyberinfrastructure that can efficiently and with high precision and accuracy find, extract, and organize data that are critical to advancing many areas of science and leveraging current and past investments in data acquisition.  We are developing a geoscience-oriented trained computing system, powered by world-class high throughput computing infrastructure, that will serve as a cross-disciplinary tool for finding, extracting, and organizing “dark data” from the text, tables, and figures of hundreds of thousands of documents.  Early results indicate that our system can perform tasks of data identification and extraction reliably and at a fraction of the time and cost of humans.  We hope to produce a dependable EarthCube building block that can serve many scientific communities.

The purpose of this project is to create a concept that incorporates findings and requirements from ongoing EarthCube activities as well as other cross-agency Earth Science informatics efforts. The architecture models will be a roadmap for building an extensible and sustainable EarthCube system that facilitates new science and inspires substantive participation of a broad spectrum of geoscientists. The project team is led by a group of computer scientists from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and private industry that has extensive experience and a proven track record leading the architecture, design, and development of complex and data intensive science data systems. They will specifically focus on the development of a guiding architecture report and specification. The results of this EarthCube architecture study can intellectually contribute to other scientific and agency efforts as they are studying new architectural models to address scientific data management and discovery in the big data era.

A major need in the geosciences is to reduce the amount of time geoscientists spend on "data wrangling" tasks (finding, accessing, subsetting, gridding, processing, reformatting, visualizing) so that they can spend more time on complex scientific analysis.

ASSET will develop a means for scientists to document and interact with all of the data management and analysis tools that they need to create a scientific result, and it will add tools to find common patterns in their work to help find tools that could reduce the time needed to produce the result. This work may also help to make moethods and analyses more transparent by providing the means to track the steps in creating a scientific result.

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The Climate and Forecast (CF) metadata conventions for netCDF (netCDF-CF) are currently used widely by weather forecasters, climate scientists, and remote-sensing researchers to include metadata along with scientific data, and numerous open source and commercial software tools have been developed to explore and analyze data sets that use the conventions. This project will work to extend the existing metadata conventions in ways that will broaden the range of earth science domains whose data can be represented. By broadening the applicability of an established convention, this effort seeks to extend its benefits to related earth science domains and reduce the amount of effort scientists must expend decoding and reformatting datasets created by other research groups. This, in turn, will leave researchers more time for analysis, leading to a better understanding of the physical processes the data describe.

CHORDS makes it simple for small research teams to make their real-time data available to the research community in standard formats. By following a few simple steps, a CHORDS portal can be created for a research team and their data can be streamed into it very easily. CHORDS can also be used to access data from large NSF research platforms like radars, aircraft, ships and operational networks of sophisticated instrumentation.

BALTO seeks to build a tool and infrastructure to allow the community to easily submit long-tail observational data that cannot easily fit into existing data repositories. A data brokering technique will be developed to accomplish the goals of the study. Graduate students, including from underrepresented minority groups, will receive training opportunities via this project. 

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This project brings together six paleobiological databases so that they share a single set of Internet-based commands by which researchers and the public can easily access fossil records from all of Earth history. By coordinating with other emerging efforts in geological and biological data sharing, best practices, and protocols, we ensure that data will be freely available to all, enabling new scientific syntheses and discovery, more powerful educational opportunities, and general exploration of the history of life on Earth.  This project establishes a Paleobiological Data Consortium, consisting of leaders of cyberinfrastructure resources in the paleobiosciences and allied disciplines, with the goal of sharing best practices and protocols among the geoinformatic and bioinformatic communities.                

The Cloud-Hosted Real-time Data Services for the Geosciences (CHORDS), a real-time data management infrastructure will provide a system to archive, navigate and distribute real-time data streams via the Internet, and employ data and metadata formats that adhere to standards, which simplify the user experience.

Connecting the Earth Science and Cyberinfrastructure communities to advance the analysis of high resolution topography data.

This EarthCube Research Coordination Network (RCN) will bring together communities that create and use high resolution map data, including those that conduct research on earth surface processes and those that create the technology to make these types of complex data usable. Members of this network will work to share currently available resources and best practices, and to develop new tools to make data more available to researchers. Training will focus on teaching graduate student and early career researchers to access and use high resolution map data to answer earth science research questions. 

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Working with environmental sensor manufacturers and researchers, the X-DOMES project will develop tools and social and technical infrastructure to facilitate the creation of data about data (metadata). Metadata describes not only who, when and where the observations were made, but also it must document how an observation came to be (provenance). By taking this knowledge out of manuals and human-readable documents, the X-DOMES model creates metadata that can be treated like data -- discoverable and searchable, making it ready to be incorporated into automated archival and processing for quality assurance and validation methods.  The X-DOMES pilot project will provide a suite of tools, built upon community-adopted standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to demonstrate and facilitate the generation of documents that are discoverable and accessible on-line and/or directly from onboard sensor descriptions. The project will also demonstrate mechanisms to associate the data with the metadata through standards-based web services.

This project seeks to build a system of systems, a "CyberWay," through integrating the capabilities and systems of multiple existing EarthCube building blocks, particularly BCube, CyberConnector, CHORDS, and GeoWS. BCube enables broker-based data discovery. CyberConnector unifies pre-processing, production virtualization, geoprocessing modeling, and data discovery, access, and interoperability through open geospatial standards. CHORDS connects small instruments and sensors to the Internet in real time. GeoWS provides a framework and infrastructure for data management and distribution with unified RESTful interfaces. Selected capabilities from other building blocks will be also integrated through standard service interfaces. Additional services will be developed to meet specific requirements identified for particular geoscience use cases.

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This EarthCube conceptual design project is to develop a data-oriented and human-centric EarthCube enterprise architecture for achieving the goal of EarthCube as a community-driven activity to transform the conduct of geoscience research and education. The proposed EarthCube enterprise architecture will have geoscientists and domain experts at its center and facilitate them to communicate and collaborate through data sharing, and ultimately bring geosciences forward in a holistic fashion. This project seeks to design a conceptual architecture that can bring geoscientists, computing scientists, and social scientists together to collaborate on networks of data, technology, applications, business models, and stakeholders.

This Building Blocks project develops the Digital Crust, an online workspace that allows for the linking, access, and extraction of all data related to the Earth’s crust, with the goal of facilitating the creation of 4D data products from those linked data sets. The platform can serve as a resource to bring together geoscientists working on separate aspects of the Earth system, by bringing their data/ideas together and by providing an environment to view the Earth from different perspectives. Hosting multiple data types and sometimes conflicting interpretations and hypotheses of Earth processes will promote community discussion and debate on Earth processes that will foster interaction, collaboration, and data/idea sharing among scientists who might otherwise never have met. Digital Crust also seeks to be a resource for educators and other interested in introducing students to the Earth sciences, and to expose gaps in data-knowledge with regards to the Earth’s crust.

This EarthCube Building Blocks project will draw from significant disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise in the development, implementation and support of geoscientific modeling architectures and in the adoption of community standards in model development and data management. This team will integrate existing model architectures, model coupling standards, and data standards into a set of open-source Earth System Bridge building blocks that will transform the process of Earth system model coupling, and bridge the present technological gap.

The ECITE federated Integration and Test (I&T) environment has the potential to scale and extend to an NSF wide integration and test capability that can serve as a model and example for other agencies. The ECITE team will actively engage EarthCube and the wider geosciences community in definition of requirements, design, and testing of the system. ECITE will consist of a seamless federated system of scalable and location independent distributed computational resources (nodes) across the US. The nodes will provide compute and storage resources requiring minimal system administration. ECITE is an important step in ensuring that EarthCube components will be able to work together to provide a successful framework that can continue to evolve to meet the needs of the geosciences community. This research addresses timely issues of integration, test and evaluation methodologies and best practices with a strong interoperability theme to advance disciplinary research through the integration of diverse and heterogeneous data, algorithms, systems and sciences. The results and findings will provide guidance for EarthCube evolution and future integration efforts. Access to the resulting platform will enable and encourage the EarthCube community to develop prototypes, try out new technologies, and to share ideas, concepts and experiments                

This Building Blocks project brings together the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), UNAVCO, and Cornell University to understand how to improve the processes of collaboration and resource sharing in the geosciences by demonstrating and encouraging the adoption of structured information systems rooted in common standards. Using two large geoscience research programs as case studies, this effort will demonstrate how semantic web and linked data technology can play an essential role in the coordination and organization of scientific virtual organizations and their products, thereby accelerating the pace of scientific discovery and innovation. Using the open source VIVO software, this project will seek to interlink information and data across platforms and research projects in an ontology-based standard data format (RDF), utilizing well developed web identifier and vocabulary structures.

This project will develop software tools to connect three established, well-supported, and critically important data sources: the Paleobiology Database (PBDB, paleontological, literature based), iDigPaleo (paleontological, specimen based) and iDigBio (neontological, specimen based). This project will allow users of any one of these databases to access and query the others at the same time, returning a much richer, combined set of data to the user. The development of this system will allow scientists to ask and answer new research questions affecting fields as diverse as biogeographic/niche modeling, systematics, functional morphology, evolutionary biology, ecology, climatology, conservation biology, oceanography, and petroleum geology. This project will fundamentally change the nature of the research questions that can be addressed by the scientific community.

This project supports a partnership between geochronologists who have built and run laboratory facilities that are designed to measure the ages of rocks using radioisotopic and astronomical methods, geoscientists who are building synthetic databases that depend critically on accurate and precise ages of rocks in order to test hypotheses in the Earth and life sciences, and computer scientists who are building infrastructure components that are now being used broadly in education and research. The aim is to address a 'grand challenge' in the Earth sciences: to develop a fully integrated four-dimensional digital Earth so that we may fully understand dynamic Earth system evolution through time.

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This Building Blocks project brings together significant geosciences holdings in the ocean, earth and polar sciences to demonstrate how innovative technologies can be robustly applied to these facilities to enhance the capabilities for scientists to discover and interpret relevant geoscience data and knowledge. The end product, GeoLink, will lower barriers to cross-repository data discovery and access, while respecting and preserving repository autonomy and heterogeneity.  GeoLink seeks to develop a cyberinfrastructure that allows searching and browsing of content from multiple data sources through semantic integration of digitally published “Linked Open Data.”

The goal of this Building Blocks project is to create a system for software stewardship in geosciences that will empower scientists to manage their software as valuable scientific assets. It will significantly improve the adoption of open data and open software initiatives, improve reproducibility, and advance scientific scholarship. Scientific software stewardship requires a combination of cyberinfrastructure, social infrastructure, and professional development infrastructure. This project seeks to facilitate the publishing, dissemination and stewardship of scientific software, with the goal of improving the adoption of open data and open software initiatives, as well as furthering scientific scholarship and collaboration.

Polar geosciences stands at the precipice of a revolution, one enabled by the confluence of cutting edge analytical tools, petabytes of high-resolution imagery, and an ever growing array of high performance computing resources. 

ICEBERG - Imagery Cyberinfrastructure and Extensible Building-Blocks to Enhance Research in the Geosciences, is an extensible system for coupling open-source image analysis tools with the use of high performance and distributed computing (HPDC) for imagery-enabled geoscience research. 

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This project builds upon previous work focused on integrated discovery of common information themes including precipitation in discrete data from the CUAHSI hydrologic information system and continuous data from the Unidata THREDDS data server. Investigators will advance that work by exploring the creation of new technologies for publishing and discovery of information through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Common Infrastructure, the definition of a Common Information Model for discrete and continuous data, development of shared software tools for using this Common Information Model, and extension of the concepts to similar information in the Polar, Ocean and Solid Earth Sciences.

Using Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA) as a testbed, the project will adopt elements of three EarthCube technologies that have been or are being developed by EarthCube Building Block projects: CINERGI (Community INventory of EarthCube Resources for Geoscience Interoperability), GeoWS (Geoscience Web Services), and GeoLink (Semantic Web technology), to build the architecture of the alliance, thereby testing, validating, and potentially improving these technologies. The technical work will focus on creating a flexible and scalable framework that will allow a growing number of partner systems to plug into shared capabilities such as applications for integrated data discovery and data submission and contribute their resources. Architectural changes at IEDA will go hand-in-hand with the transition of IEDA's organizational structure toward the envisioned multi-institutional alliance.                

Across many Earth Science disciplines, research depends on the availability of representative samples collected above, at, and beneath Earth’s surface, on the moon and in space, or generated in experiments. These samples are fundamental references that are studied to generate new knowledge about the earth and the entire universe and a deeper understanding of the processes that created and shaped it, the availability of natural resources and the risk of natural hazards. The EarthCube Research Coordination Network iSamplES (Internet of Samples in the Earth Sciences) seeks to define, articulate and address the needs and challenges of maintaining, cataloguing and sharing physical samples as a critical part of the geoscience domain.  Existing resources that facilitate these goals will be investigated, and best practices and standards will be recognized and encouraged across the Earth Science community as a cyber-infrastructure foundation.

A wide spectrum of maturing methods and tools, collectively characterized as Semantic Web Technologies, is enabling machines to complete tasks automatically that previously required human direction. For the Geosciences, Semantic Web Technologies will vastly improve the integration, analysis and dissemination of research data and results. This EAGER project will conduct exploratory research applying state-of-the-art Semantic Web Technologies to support data representation, discovery, analysis, sharing and integration of datasets from the global oceans, and related resources including meeting abstracts and library holdings.  A key contribution will be semantically enabled cyberinfrastructure components capable of automated data integration across distributed repositories.

This project will create a new, unique set of high-latitude electro-dynamic, ionospheric-thermospheric-­‐magnetospheric cyberbased tools and products that will be available to the entire geosciences community. In combination, the data products from this project will allow the derivation of a first principle electromagnetic solution for the auroral ionosphere. Project will develop a new set of data resources for the geoscience community in the form of a complete electromagnetic solution of the auroral ionosphere and will focus on developing the "Data Infrastructure for Communities" component of the EarthCube Integrative Activities. The project will thus allow access to not only the desired derived products, but also provide support for other modeling efforts by allowing access to the database of input data and intermediary products. The system will also be designed to be extensible, allowing additional data products and models to be integrated into the system. The system will fully support existing standards that are used in the broader geosciences community such as the Data Access Protocol (DAP).The research undertaken in this proposal will enable transformative research in two otherwise separated fields: magnetosphere-­‐ionosphere and neutral atmosphere. 

“Pangeo: An Open Source Big Data Climate Science Platform” is a project designed to solve one of climate science’s most pressing challenges: accessing and utilizing the explosive growth in the size of climate datasets, which have become a bulky but indispensable tool for scientific inquiry in climate change research.

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This project develops an NSF EarthCube Building Block focused on Polar Data Science. The system will build upon work in Information Retrieval and Data Science and upon existing investment from NSF Polar, EarthCube, and from DARPA and NASA in this area. The system will collect, analyze, and make interactive the wealth of textual and scientific Polar data collected to date across the Deep web of scientific information -- scientific journals, multimedia information, scientific data, web pages, etc.

This building blocks project is to research and develop a system whereby geoscience and environmental software are generated effectively by geoscientists themselves, so that the software can be captured, curated, managed, and made available to all parties upon request. This project will begin this process by building partnerships between computer scientists, software developers, and scientists across all geoscience domains with the goal or creating a software ecosystem and a culture of software stewardship that will empower geoscientists and others to make their software accessible and manage it as a valuable scientific asset.

This project will develop and utilize capabilities for its scientists to "drill down" into abstract statistics about the flows of the atmosphere and ocean, to build a library of Notebooks with clear views of the actual weather systems (in the atmospheric part of the work) or Gulf of Mexico ocean eddies (in the ocean part of the work).

Data heterogeneity and accessibility are major barriers to scientific progress. Many community curated data repositories (CCDRs) have emerged in the paleogeosciences in response to the needs of their scientific communities, but these CCDRs are not well integrated. THROUGHPUT seeks to transform geoscientific research by breaking down the barriers among the CCDRs that serve geoscientists. All participating resources are closely engaged with their respective disciplinary communities and each is mobilizing data from its communities; the key need is to facilitate data interchange among CCDRs. The work will align several major CCDRs using a system that develops new shared services that rely on common standards, and demonstrates the kinds of new scientific insights that become possible with an integrated geoscientific infrastructure.

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