This is the program update for April 26, including information on funded projects, upcoming presentations, information on the roadmaps, an update on the June Charrette, and highlights from the community groups. Have questions or comments? Please get in touch with the EarthCube team at earthcube@nsf.gov.
Funding Update
As a result of the first round of Expressions of Interest, a series of awards have been made (information available here). These include community groups forming around essential components of EarthCube (Data Mining, Data Access, Data Discovery, Governance, Workflow, and Semantics). A second set of proof-of-concept awards were also made to support demonstration of possible components of EarthCube. All of the groups are open to participation by anyone with ideas to offer can be joined online if you’d like to be part of the ongoing conversations and activities. A list of scheduled phone calls and events can be found online.
To assist in the tracking of the groups, there will be a weekly posting of updates via email through the site contact list and on the EarthCube website: please see the bottom of this email for this week’s summary.
In addition, a file containing the combined set of Expressions of Interest for the final target date has been posted online. Individual submissions will be updated on this page over the next week.
EGU Presentation April 26
If you’re attending the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2012 in Vienna, Austria, EarthCube Cliff Jacobs will provide an update on EarthCube in session ESSI2.7 at 15:30 on Thursday, 26 April. In addition, on that same day, from 19:00–20:00 in Room 2, Cliff Jacobs will be giving an updated on the U.S. EarthCube efforts. More information is available here.
Roadmaps
One of the primary tasks of the funded projects is to develop roadmaps in preparation for the June 2012 Charrette. Guidance documents for preparing Community Group roadmaps and Concept Groups roadmaps have been posted (http://earthcube.ning.com/profiles/blogs/roadmap-guidance-documents). These groups are open to all participants, if you believe you can contribute to sharping the roadmaps in any or all of the points of the guidelines, please participate in the discussions by joining the groups online.
June 2012 Charrette Update
The next EarthCube community meeting will be held June 12-14. The goal of the meeting is be to create robust drafts of community-derived roadmaps for the funded community groups and to discuss and provide input into the roadmaps for the present concept award portfolio. After the meeting, all roadmap documents will be posted for public comment to allow the broadest possible input from the community and all interested parties. The final versions of the community group road maps will be made public in mid to late summer in preparation for continued funding. Roadmaps, deemed by NSF to be representative of community input and addressing guidance provided, will form the basis of additional funding in late 2012 or early 2013.
The event will begin at 9am on June 12, and will run until 4pm on June 13. The meeting will be open to all participants. Similar to the November 2011 Charrette, you will be able to participate either onsite (at a hotel in Arlington, VA, limited to approximately 140 participants) or virtually (via WebEx and other online technologies). Participants for the onsite component of the meeting will be responsible for the cost of their attendance, which will include a registration fee. Full or partial support of the attendance of early career scientists and junior faculty will be made available.
Additional information about the meeting will be posted online as details are made available.
Group Updates
To help cross-project coordination, each funded group will be posting a brief update as part of this weekly newsletter. This week we’re starting with just information from the community groups, but in following weeks these notes will include information from the concept awards as well. Enjoy.
For general information on all the current awards, including links to join the group discussions, please see this page.
Governance Community Group
Group website: earthcube.ning.com/group/governance
Workshops & Meetings Hosted (all are open to the public; agendas and WebEx call-in posted to the website):
- Four formal Steering Committee (SC) Calls/Webinars
- One SC Workshop in Denver, CO with virtual component
- Two virtual Plenary Sessions
- Weekly SC calls on Fridays at 10am PDT/1pm EDT
- Current Research on Existing Governance Structures (all finished summaries are posted on the website):
- Finished research on EarthCube White Papers and EoIs focused on governance and system-wide design
- Finished research on Project Mohole and Weill & Ross IT Governance
- Actively seeking suggestions from the community on other references to review
Current Focus
- Organizing community-wide focus groups to address components of the Roadmap
- Call for group participation is posted on the website site
- An initial outline is available through Google Docs
Activities Planned:
- April 27 SC Call, WebEx and Agenda will be posted on the website
- First focus group sessions week of April 30
Other Information:
- Coordinating an EarthCube Vimeo site in order to facilitate the recording of and viewing of virtual sessions across the EarthCube community
Semantics and Ontologies Community Group
Group website: earthcube.ning.com/group/semantics-and-ontologies
Hassan Babaie of the Semantics Group submitted request for session at AGU meeting this fall: Session Proposal (ID: 1398610) entitled: “Semantic Web and ontologies in Earth science”
Virtual WebEx conference was held on 24th April. Summary report being prepared by Krzysztof Janowicz (jano@geog.ucsb.edu) of UC Santa Barbara
Face to face workshop agenda, including speakers and panel members who have volunteered to lead community discussions addressing the elements of the Roadmap identified by NSF, has been finalized (April 30-May1). The workshop will have WebEx capabilities for virtual interaction with the broader community.
Workflow Community Group
Group website: earthcube.ning.com/group/workflow
We have set up an additional web site describing events and activities in the group, with all the documents that the group is creating as public so anyone in the community can edit and contribute.
We have posted a set of questions to the community concerning workflow technologies, as a vehicle to collect input and project what issues we are most interested in capturing in the roadmap report.
We agreed to set up weekly invited presentations from significant constituents of the geosciences community as identified in the EoIs and selected to the Governance Forum, which will address the Workflow Questionnaire prepared by the group.
Data Mining Community Group
Group website: earthcube.ning.com/group/data-discovery-mining-integration
Webex meeting held April 13th to discuss logistics, see use case presentation and determine best ways to obtain needs for data mining. Anne Wilson presented use case, “Towards a DDMA Reference Architecture.”
Rahul Ramachandran reviewed data mining EOIs and created a first cut at needed questions for obtaining information about data mining tools, “Data Mining Tools Review Criteria”
Webex meeting held April 20th including a discussion of the EOI review, a use case presentation, logistics and the EarthCube Roadmap for Mining. Joseph Baker presented use case, “Mining the SuperDARN Geospace Facility Database Using Spatio-Temporal Process Discovery Algorithms.”
A session proposal was submitted to the AGU Fall meeting entitled “A Community Roadmap for Discovery, Access, and Mining of Geosciences Data.”
A Google Docs site was set up as a working area to collaboratively develop needed documents for the group. A Google groups site was also set up to serve as a data repository so that DDMA Mining developed materials, background materials, meeting notes, etc. would be easy to find in one central location. The DDMA area on the ning site is being used to post notices and activities, and references documents on the Google sites as needed.
The DDMA Mining group will meet via Webex on Fridays from 2:00 – 3:00 CDT, just prior to the DDMA Access group Webex. The next several Webex sessions will include use case presentations and discussions
The DDMA Mining group is currently addressing ways to obtain information about mining tools, current capabilities, needs and challenges from the widest audience possible. One particular area of focus is encouraging effective communication and understanding between geoscientists and data mining experts.
Data Access Services Community Group
Group website: earthcube.ning.com/group/data-discovery-mining-integration
Webex meeting held April 13th was a kick-off meeting. Tanu Malik presented (i) goals of the workshop, (ii) broad topics on agenda, (iii) items on the roadmap document, and (iv) a tentative timeline. Members of the community identified their roles in the workshop and discussed a few use-cases to begin with.
Webex meeting held April 20th covered the state-of-the-art through two use-cases, Robert Jacob, Argonne National Laboratory on “Sharing big data with a few colleagues” and Ruth Duerr, National Snow and Ice Data Center on “User Access Issues at the National Snow and Ice Data Center” Robert demonstrated several access control issues in harnessing resources across institutions and presented a few alternatives. Ruth presented issues faced by data centers in making large amounts of data public.
Anne Wilson from University of Colorado also presented the vision for her Reference Architecture. (Anne had presented the RA in the previous Discovery group meeting) Anne will use the RA to document processes that each sub-group is using to get the necessary technical and conceptual end-user requirements.
A session proposal was submitted to the AGU Fall meeting entitled “A Community Roadmap for Discovery, Access, and Mining of Geosciences Data.”
A Google Docs site was set up as a working area to collaboratively develop needed documents for the group. A Google groups site was also set up to serve as a data repository so that DDMA Access developed materials, background materials, meeting notes, etc. would be easy to find in one central location. The DDMA area on the ning site is being used to post notices and activities, and references documents on the Google sites as needed.
The DDMA Access group will meet via Webex on Fridays from 3:00 – 4:00 CDT, just after to the DDMA Mining group Webex. The next several Webex sessions will include use case presentations and discussions.
The DDMA Access group is currently addressing ways to fit all the use cases into a conceptual model and find issues that lie at the interface of discovery mining, and other groups.
Data Discovery Services Community Group
Group website: earthcube.ning.com/group/data-discovery-mining-integration
Weekly webex for Data Discovery occurs every Wednesday, 12-1PM Pacific time. Ning site has the webex information.
Meetings have been held so far on Wed April 11th, 18th, 25th,
- April 11th: Kickoff, discuss logistics, plan for report due in June, plan for subsequent meetings.
- April 18th: Presentation by Steve Richards on metadata standardization and catalog federation in USGIN and NGDMS.
- April 25th: Presentation by Amarnath Gupta on the NIH-funded Neurosciences Information Framework (NIF) project.
Decided to adopt a “reference architecture” approach for laying out the roadmap for DDMA activities. Anne Wilson will lead this effort.
A session proposal was submitted to the AGU Fall meeting entitled “A Community Roadmap for Discovery, Access, and Mining of Geosciences Data.”
A Google Docs site has been set up as a working area for sharing documents including, meeting minutes, reference docs, and the roadmap report.
The DDMA area on the ning site is being used to post notices and activities, and references documents on the Google sites as needed.
The DDMA Discovery group will continue to meet via Webex on Wednesdays from 12-1PM Pacific time (2-3PM Central; 3-4PM Eastern). The next session on May 2nd will include a presentation fromRobert Gibb, New Zealand about a cloud-based approach for discovery and access. We are also lining up presentations from some industry representatives.
Issues being addressed: Linking to the broad community of geoscientists; Developing a common roadmap for EarthCube data activities (DDMA).
Brokering Concept Award
Group website: earthcube.ning.com/group/brokering
Held a strategy meeting on 23 April where the Brokering Framework Principles were presented and the features of an example broker described.
The NSF guidelines for road map development were discussed, focusing on three topics: challenges, requirements and solutions.
The meeting was an chance for the Brokering Concept Activity to become more familiar with the needs, interests and attitudes of its partners. Excellent feedback from the partners highlighted the benefits and challenges for brokering in EarthCube.
For more information visit EarthCube’s webpage.