Unidata Outreach

Status Report: February 2015

Ben Domenico

Strategic Focus Areas

Unidata Outreach supports the following goals described in Unidata Strategic Plan:

  1. Enable widespread, efficient access to geoscience data
  2. Develop and provide open-source tools for effective use of geoscience data
  3. Provide cyberinfrastructure leadership in data discovery, access, and use
  4. Build, support, and advocate for the diverse geoscience community

Below are a few excerpts from the current Unidata Strategic Plan that highlight the importance of the outreach activities summarized in this status update.

  • ...to build infrastructure that makes it easy to integrate and use data from disparate geoscience disciplines

Data formats like netCDF, together with community-based data standards like the Climate and Forecast metadata convention and the Common Data Model are enhancing the widespread usability and interoperability of scientific datasets.

  • ...advance geoscience data and metadata standards and conventions
  • ..our experience shows us that robust solutions arise from community and collaborative efforts
  • ...close partnerships and collaboration with geoscience data providers, tool developers, and other stakeholders, and the informed guidance of our governing committees

Activities Since the Last Status Report

This work involves contributing to and formalizing community and formal international data system standards.

  • Unidata Outreach negotiated a Memo of Understanding has been negotiated between UCAR and the Open Geospatial Consortium
    • Annual membership and Technical Committee meeting registration fees have been waived
    • Unidata hosts the OGC Technical Committee meetings in June 2015
  • Unidata Outreach represented UCAR/Unidata at the OGC Technical Committee meetings in Calgary and Tokyo
  • The NetCDF GML encoding standard has been approved for public comment by the OGC Architecture Board
  • The OGC has asked Unidata to participate in a new initiative related to Application Programming Interface standards (as opposed to the usual OGC Web Services standards.)

CUAHSI Hydrological Information Systems (HIS) Standing Committee

The CUAHSI HIS Standing Committee is roughly equivalent to the Unidata Strategic Advisory Committee (USAC).     As Unidata's Policy Committee in the past and more recently with USAC, there are difficult decisions about what to focus on in a era of limited resources.

  • Unidata Outreach has servied on the CUASI Hydrological Information System standing committee  
  •  Jeff Weber and Ben Domenico participated in several teleconferences for this group and provided input on the proposal for the Hydrological Water Data Center and on the responses to reviewers questions

EarthCube Discrete Continuous Building Block Project

The goal is to investigate better ways of connecting gridded (field based) data & time-varying properties of discrete spatial objects (points, lines, polygons).  This is to be accomplished by developing a common conceptual model and tools that can map between gridded (netCDF/CF) and vector/time series (WaterML 2.0) data encodings, with visualization of time series parameter values. Develop tools for guiding usage.

This project now is focused on one use case: namely, the National Flood Interoperability Experiment for its final year.  Unidata Outreach is coordinating the aspect of the NFIE that involves the NCAR WRF-Hydro model and the group that supports it.

CyberConnector Building Block Project

This project is building an EarthCube building block, called CyberConnector, for facilitating the automatic preparation and feeding of both historic and near-real time Earth Observation (EO) customized data and on-demand derived products into Earth science models (ESMs). CyberConnector will free scientists from the laborious preparation of model inputs and release of model outputs. It will automatically process the EO data into the right products in the right form needed for ESM initialization, validation, and inter-comparison. It can support many different ESMs through its standard interfaces under a unified framework. Unidata's main role in this project will be to assist in the installation of a Unidata IDD/LDM node at the main site at George Mason University.

Planned Activities

Ongoing Activities

We plan to continue the following activies:

  • Standards -- OGC TC Meeting participation
  • EarthCube projects
  • ODIP Phase 2 initiation
  • Work on cloud based Python client software development
  • Coordination of brokering system integration with TDS in the cloud

Collaborations

  • NCAR GIS Program
  • Collaboration with ESSI Labs to experiment with their brokering layer in conjunction with THREDDS Data Servers
  • UCAR wide representative to OGC Technical Committee
  • ODIP Steering Committee
  • CUAHSI Hydrological Information System Standing Committee
  • EarthCube Discrete/Continuous Building Block
  • EarchCube CyberConnector Building Block
  • Wakari Cloud-based Collaborative Python Development Environment

New Activities

  • ODIP Phase 2 (at a reduced level)

Areas for Committee Feedback

Any suggestions for better approaches to these efforts

 Relevant Metrics

Much of this work involves international collaborations.   The OGC NetCDF Standards Working Group, for example, has representatives from Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, England, France,  Netherlands, Japan,  United Arab Emirates, Spain, Greece, China, and Finland