Community Services Status Report
April - September 2004
Work referenced within this report is based on advocacy,
community outreach, and identifying new data sources and distribution
trends within the community, associated with "Endeavor 1: Responding
to a broader and more diverse community" and "Endeavor 2: Comprehensive
Support Services, [Data services, systems, and tools]" from the Unidata
2008 Proposal. There is overlap of external activities in the areas
of "Real-time, self-managing data flows" (Endeavor 3), Endeavor 4: Software
to analyze and visualize geoscience data", along with "Distributed,
organized collections of digital material" (Endeavor 5), and "Improved
data access infrastructure" (Endeavor 6).
Note: This is the first Community Services report that combines the
activities of Linda Miller, Jo Hansen, and Jeff Weber.
Community Outreach
- Coordinated Unidata
seminars. The seminars are a mix of Unidata staff presentations
and other important activities taking place at UCAR/NCAR and other
external activities important to Unidata. All seminars are available
for review on the Web Portal, linked above. Seminars during this reporting
period include:
- GIS Initiative: Developing an Atmospheric Data Model for GIS
Olga Wilhelmi and Jennifer Boehnert
- A technical overview of the Abstract Data Distribution Environment
(ADDE)
Don Murray
- MeteoForum: An International Network of Meteorological Training
Centers for the 21st Century
Tom Yoksas and Tim Spangler
- Participated in NOAA Stakeholder's Meeting - Washington, DC, 16
April 2004
- Attended the NOAA
Integrated Surface Observations Forum/Working Group Meeting, 20-22
July 2004, NCDC-Asheville, NC
- Attended the NWS
Partners' Meeting - Silver Spring, MD, 24-25 June 2004
- Co-Chair and Organizer of the International Conference of Interactive
Information Processing Systems (IIPS) Symposium, to be held 9-13 January
2005 in San Diego, CA
- Co-Chair of Internet Applications, Web Portals, and Cyberinfrastructure
session. (DeSouza Community Award will be arranged prior to the
session on Wednesday, 11 January 2005)
- Organizing an American Geophysical Union AGU
Fall Meeting Session. The special focus session is, "Cyberinfrastructure for Earth Systems
Science."
- Organizing a European Geosciences Union (EGU)
special session to be held 25-29 April 2005 in Vienna, Austria..
The session's title is, "Earth Systems Science Data Access, Distribution,
and Use for Education and Research." This session will include
co-convenors Elen Cutrim, Western Michigan University, Stefano Nativi,
Institute of Methodologies for Enviornmental Analysis of the Italian
National Research Council, and Mohan Ramamurthy, UCAR/Unidata.
- Met with Professor Geerd Hoffmann, Director General, Deutscher Wetterdienst
and Vice President of Commission for Basic Systems, World Meteorological
Organization (WMO) for a half-day meeting. The nature of the meeting
was an information exchange, based on the Future WMO Information System
(FWIS). The FWIS will "be used for the collection and sharing
of information for all WMO and related international programmes,"
according to Hoffmann. We will monitor this development and provide
input and assistance as it develops. They hope to have a phased implementation
of the FWIS beginning in 2007.
- In April we initiated a monthly online newsletter in response to
a request from the Users Committee. To improve the flow of information
to the community, we have also bumped up the postings to the "News"
section on our home page.
- A collection of articles written by seven of the presenters at the
Users 2003 workshop was submitted to the AMS bulletin in early April.
The format for the collection resulted from a suggestion from the
editor after a meeting summary had been submitted. Instead he suggested
an alternate format:
- Anton Kruger, Mark Laufersweiler, and Michael Morgan: Introduction
- MayYuan: Beyond mapping,
- Scott Shipley: "Dr. T's forecasts"
- Alex DeCaria: lightning density case
- Ted Haberman: explanation of GIS and how it will change Unidata
- OlgaWilhelmi: current status of the GIS initiative at UCAR
- Sam Williamson: description of the intersection of the Federal
Coordinating office and the needs of the developing GIS community
- Mohan Ramamurthy: basic tasks for Unidata for the next 5 years.
At this time (October) edited articles are in the hands of individual
authors for their review. Publication could occur as early as December
2004 or as late as February 2005.
Data Access and Distribution
- Level II data expansion is underway with Unidata providing the topologies
for the <.edu> sites.
- Sites feeding from CRAFT site (OU) are being moved to the other
two providers (Purdue and Education Research Consortium of the Western
Carolina's) to even the load. This needs to be completed by October
2004.
- Data Interactive Publications: These data interactive publications
are built on top of several data delivery, access, discovery, and
visualization tools developed by Unidata and its partner organizations.
These "case studies" illustrate how components of this process
fit together in hopes that the community will adopt this approach
to case study development. It is the UPC's goal to
have the community create and contribute case studies via these mechanisms:
the Local Data Manager (LDM), Open-source Project for a Network Data
Access Protocol (OPeNDAP) and Abstract Data Distribution Environment
(ADDE) services, Thematic Realtime Environmental Distributed Data
Service (THREDDS) cataloging services, and the Integrated Data Viewer
(IDV). See Examples
of Data Interactive Publications for additional information.
Miscellaneous
- Serving on the UCAR/NCAR/UOP Metrics Committee with the task of
collecting data service information from the entire organization to
create a Metrics/Matrix.
Linda Miller
Community Services, Unidata
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
303-497-8646
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