A New Generation of Data Services for Earth System Science Education and Research: Unidata

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A New Generation of Data Services for Earth
System Science Education and Research Unidatas
Plans and Directions

• AGU Fall Meeting
• San Francisco, CA
• 6 December 2005
• Dr. Mohan Ramamurthy
• Director, Unidata Program Center
• UCAR Office of Programs
• Boulder, CO

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Science Drivers

• Environmental problems like global change water
  cycle transcend disciplinary as well as
  geographic boundaries, requiring
  multidisciplinary approaches and global teams for
  solving them
• Rapid advances in observational technologies,
  especially in remote sensing
• Increasing use of complex, coupled modeling
  systems

Research studies on societal impact of
hurricane-related flooding involve integrating
data from atmospheric sciences, oceanography,
hydrology, geology, geography, and social
sciences.
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Science Drivers Examples
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End to End Information Services
GIS Integration
Emergency Response
Coastal Environments
Need integrated services
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Education Drivers

• A holistic Earth-system science approach to
  education
• Active, student-centered learning. i.e., learning
  science by doing science
• Observations (data)
• Tools (models, visualization)
• Discovery

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Technology Trends Enabling a New Generation of
Data Services

• Internet the World Wide Web
• Commodity microprocessors
• Object-oriented programming
• Open standards
• Web services
• Extensible Markup Language (XML)
• Global, high-bandwidth and wireless networks
• Digital libraries
• Collaboratories
• Grid Computing/e-Science
• Data Portals and Federated, distributed Servers
• Geographic Information Systems
• Knowledge environments
• Ontologies and Semantic web
• Data mining and knowledge discovery

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Data Services An Evolution

• An evolution from proprietary data systems
  towards more open standards-based data services
  i.e. web services.
• Data services should address the myriad
  applications and needs of the community
  research, education, outreach, collaboration,
  etc.
• This transition to web services poses many
  challenges.

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Service-Oriented Science

• Web Services are self-contained, self-describing,
  modular applications that can be published,
  located, and invoked across the Web.
• XML based Web Services are emerging as tools for
  creating next generation distributed systems that
  facilitate program-to-program interaction without
  the user-to-program interaction.
• Besides recognizing the heterogeneity as a
  fundamental ingredient, these web services,
  independent of platform and environment, can be
  packaged and published on the internet as they
  can communicate with other systems using the
  common protocols.
• Emerging web services standards are enabling much
  easier system-to-system integration.

Source Ian Foster, Science, 6 May 2005
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Google Maps and Personal Weather Data
How is this magic performed? Answer DHTML,
JavaScript, CSS, XML, and XSLT
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Google Earth
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A Partial List of Data Services

• Collection
• Transport
• Notification
• Cataloging and metadata generation
• Metadata submission
• Subsetting
• Aggregation
• Decoders/format converter
• Querying
• Visualization
• Collaboration
• Ontology
• Data mining
• Weblogging or blogging

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EndToEnd Data Service Development at Unidata
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Internet Data Distribution
Satellite
Radar
Model
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PrimaryInterfaces
Underlying Interfaces
Local/RemoteServices
TDS A Collection of Services
TDS (THREDDS Data Server
Interface)
OGC WCS (Web Coverage Server)
File Formats
THREDDScatalog
NetCDF interface
OPeNDAP
OpenDAP
ADDE
netCDF via HTTP
IOsp
GRID
Jgoffs
GRIB
NetCDF
NetCDF
AREA
GINI
Station
NIDS
DMSP
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TDR Another View
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Data Services for Education

• For effective incorporation of data into digital
  libraries, we need a range of data services
  tailored for education
• integrate data, models, viz. tools with learning
  objects and other curricular materials

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LEAD Data Services for NWP
NCSA
Prediction Service
UAH
Product Generation Mining Service
User running local analysis and display tools
User Orchestrates Web Services to Create
Regional Forecast
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Data Services for Field Projects
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GALEON IE Data services for GIS Integration
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Concluding Remarks

• At Unidata, we are in the process of building
  many of these data-related services and
  technologies
• Despite the significant progress, much work still
  lies ahead
• Other organizations and communities are engaged
  in similar exercises (e.g., NOAA, IOOS, and
  CUAHSI)
• We will partner with those groups where necessary
  and leverage each others work
• We are diligently building bridges with other
  communities for mutual benefit.