NCSA environmental cyberinfrastructure demonstration project: creating cyberenvironments for environmental engineering and hydrological science communities

ABSTRACT

NCSA's Environmental Cyberinfrastructure Demonstration (ECID) project is developing a cyberenvironment to support environmental science and hydrology research. The ECID Cyberenvironment is based on a set of coordinating technologies that together provide unique capabilities for integrating local and remote work and for capturing and exploiting data and interaction provenance. The CyberCollaboratory portal provides collaboration tools to discover, share, analyze, and discuss data and information. The CyberIntegrator is a meta-workflow engine combining heterogeneous (local and remote) tools into workflows to support complex scientific analyses and simulations. Both of these tools record rich provenance into the RDF-based Tupelo 2 Toolkit where it can be graphically browsed or used through CI-KNOW, social network analysis software, to provide context-specific recommendations within the CyberCollaboratory and CyberIntegrator. These capabilities, and the ability to dynamically connect new tools into group spaces, workflows, and provenance trails, will be critical to the next-generation of community-scale, persistent cyberinfrastructure efforts.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.4 Systems and Software
          Subjects: Distributed systems

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.4 Systems and Software
          Subjects: Information networks

  J. Computer Applications
  J.2 PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING
      Subjects: Earth and atmospheric sciences

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.3 Organizational Impacts
          Subjects: Computer-supported collaborative work

General Terms:
Design, Management