Challenges and Achievements

1. Challenges and Achievements Presented by Cameron Kiddle Research Fellow, Grid Research Centre, University of Calgary

2. (http://geochronos.org/) • An on-line platform • For: • Earth Observation Scientists • Facilitating: • Collaboration between scientists • Application access, management and sharing • Data access, management and sharing • Leveraging: • Web 2.0 and social networking technologies • Cloud computing technologies • Semantic Web technologies • Funded by: • CANARIE - Network Enabled Platform (NEP-1) program • Cybera

3. Project Team Prinicipal Investigators Dr. Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa University of Alberta Dr. Benoit Rivard University of Alberta Dr. Rob Simmonds University of Calgary Dr. John Gamon University of Alberta Project Coordination Platform Development Domain Scientists

4. Virtual Organization

5. Challenges - General • Existing cyberinfrastructure tools / services are at different stages of development • Rare that something “works out of the box” • Don’t quite do what you need them to do • Often lacking in fault tolerance / interoperability • Significant integration efforts required

6. Challenges - Collaboration • Finding a platform that meets all of the scientists’ needs • Tried various platforms (Facebook, Ning) before settling on Elgg • Providing simple / intuitive user interfaces • Difficult maintaining balance between simplicity and functionality

7. Challenges - Applications • Unique challenges in managing cloud platforms (virtualization) • Greater flexibility but more points of failure • Software licence restrictions • Many software licences do not support software-as-a-service model

8. Challenges - Data • Large variety of data from many sources • Lack of / insufficient metadata standards • Automated data acquisition inhibited by human-in-the-loop processes

9. Achievements – Collaboration • Social networking portal • Elgg-based (elgg.org) • Social networking services • Blogs • Tags • Media/document sharing • Wikis • Friends/contacts • Groups • Discussions • Message boards • Calendars • Status • Activity Feeds http://geochronos.org/

10. Achievements - Applications • Interactive Application Service (IAS) • On-line, on-demand access to scientific applications • Share application sessions and data with other users • Access control to applications • Hosted on top of a cloud computing platform (ASPEN) that can dynamically provision resources on-demand

11. Achievements - Data • Spectral Libraries • Store, share and browse spectral data • Manage metadata for spectra • Create and share metadata schemas • View spectral plots, metadata, ancillary files and maps

12. Work in Progress • Collaboration • Additional Elggplugins to further enable collaboration • Publications, presentations ... • Open portal to public (later this year) • Applications • Batch processing and automated workflow services • Handle longer running data processing tasks and simulations • Automate data workflows (i.e., mosaic, reproject and subset MODIS data) • Data • Generalization of spectral library solution • Acquire, store, manage, browse and share other types of data • Employment of Semantic Web technologies • better link / relate data and enable ontological mapping between metadata standards

13. Contact Information Cameron Kiddle kiddlec@cpsc.ucalgary.ca http://pages.cspc.ucalgary.ca/~kiddlec/ http://geochronos.org/ info@geochronos.org http://grid.ucalgary.ca/ http://ceos.ualberta.ca/ http://www.cybera.ca/