The National Science Foundation is seeking to facilitate the conduct of geosciences research by supporting community-based cyberinfrastructure in an effort called EarthCube. The project is a joint effort between the NSF Geosciences Directorate and Office of Cyberinfrastructure, and seeks to greatly increase the productivity and capability of researchers and educators working at the frontiers of Earth system science.
The project team has set up an EarthCube community web site at http://earthcube.ning.com/. The goal is to create a forum that enables broad participation from the geosciences community and to solicit comments and white paper submissions to the EarthCube project.
In a letter addressed to geosciences community members, the EarthCube team writes:
This is an unprecedented opportunity for the geosciences to come together and share ideas on geosciences requirements, innovative technology solutions, and vision and design approaches for an integrated knowledge management system. Further information on the EarthCube and Charrette process, as it becomes available, will be posted at this website. We invite you to register to participate in the EarthCube forums and groups. We also recommend that you encourage colleagues, postdocs and students to participate.
NSF also recognizes that user requirements are required to build a knowledge management system that is useful to and used by geoscientists. Thus, we encourage you to participate in an effort to gather geosciences requirements available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GeoSciRequirements. The survey is intended to query geoscientists about their scientific and related cyberinfrastructure needs, so that common issues and goals across the geosciences can be found and discussed in the EarthCube forums and Charrette. Answering any of these questions in voluntary, and responses may be made available in the EarthCube forums. However, we encourage you to answer as many of these questions as you can on or before October 15. The feedback you provide here will be integral to shaping EarthCube in both the short and long term.
Unidata Program Center staff will be actively participating in the EarthCube discussions and determining how Unidata can best contribute as the program takes shape.
