ESDS Program

Enhancement of Mutual Discovery, Search, and Access of Data for Users of NASA and GEOSS-Cataloged Data Systems

Principal Investigator (PI): William Teng, ADNET Systems, Incorporated

The ongoing data rods Advancing Collaborative Connections for Earth System Science (ACCESS) project (NNH11ZDA001N-ACCESS; PI: Bill Teng), by removing a longstanding barrier to accessing and using NASA data (i.e., the Digital Divide) for the hydrology user community and, specifically, the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS) users, has already demonstrated a dramatic unlocking of the potential of the data (thus far, selected variables of the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) and Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) data sets). These data rods Web services, however, though visible and accessible through the HIS and through the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC), are not easily discoverable by users of other non-NASA data systems. This is also the case for Earth Observing System Data Information System (EOSDIS) data, in general. Conversely, there are vast amounts of non-NASA hydrological data (e.g., those accessible via Web services from CUAHSI HIS) that are not visible and accessible from NASA systems, such as the Simple Subset Wizard (SSW), a common gateway to data archived at NASA data centers.

The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), as a catalog of catalogs, would be a logical mechanism for providing access to the time series coverages of the data rods, as well as on-the-fly time series converted from other EOSDIS data, commonly archived in the time-step array format. There is a just-begun multi-organizational GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot Phase-6 (AIP-6) Water Services project (with participants that include members of this ACCESS proposal team) that is aimed at the GEOSS Water Strategic Target to produce (by 2015) comprehensive sets of data and information products to support decision-making for efficient management of the world's water resources, based on coordinated, sustained observations of the water cycle on multiple scales. The scope of the Water Services project is to develop a global registry of water data, map and modeling services catalogued using the standards and procedures of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the World Meteorological Organization.

This AIP-6 project builds on the results of AIP-5, for which a global publication of federated observation services for streamflow was successfully demonstrated. The individual Web Feature Services are registered with the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) and shown to be discoverable therein. Each feature in a map service describes one observed time series accessible at one location and, if available, contains a link to that time series service. Furthermore, it has subsequently been demonstrated that this infrastructure can also be adapted to provide time series access to model grid information (e.g., NLDAS, GLDAS) or grids of information over a geographic domain for a particular time interval. These prototype efforts have shown the potential for enhancing discovery, search, and access of NASA data by non-NASA users. That these prototypes have been successfully implemented strongly suggests that the proposed work can be similarly carried out and with low risk.

The overall approach of the proposed project comprises the following:

  1. Leverage Simple Subset Wizard (SSW) API and EOS Clearinghouse (ECHO)
  2. Register data rods and on-the-fly (OTF) converted time series services in GEOSS
  3. Develop Web Feature Services (WFS) for data rods and OTF converted time series
  4. Enhance metadata in WFS
  5. Make non-NASA data visible to NASA users by leveraging SSW
  6. Develop hydrological use cases to guide project deployment and serve as metrics
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