Dogan Seber from SDSC is talking about the GEON geosciences grid. Geon’s vision is to enable new discoveries in teh geosciences by utilizing an easy-to-use “integration environment”. The requirements were developed by a group of geoscientists, and then they brought in the SDSC folks, which has been working well for them. They want to bring in multiple datasets and information to integrate and interpolate data in their analysis. The goal is to bring a system where people can register datasets and search across them. They wanted the system to be friendly for teachers at all levels.
Their Cyberinfrastructure Principles:
– An equal partnership: IT works in close conjunction with science. This turns out to be challenging in social environments where people speak different languages.
-The “two-tier” approach – Technology needs are now – so use what’s available now including commercial tools and standards where applicable (this keeps the community involved and helps solve real problems, even if you’re not doing things quite the right way)…
…while developing advanced technology, and doing CS research
There are nodes in the US, India, China, and Japan.
There is a portal (using GridSphere) that allows people to search and access resources. They have a resource registration service that allows people to describe data sets. Biggest research now is how to describe resources based on ontologies, not just text matching. I’m not sure whether he’s talking about tagging by users, or something deeper than that. The search allows textual, temporal, and geospatial searches.
GEON is a a TreaGrid science gateway. The example is how to build software that anybody can use to run seismic simulations. They built an app called SYNSEIS that does this, using a small cluster for 2d simple jobs or Teragrid for larger jobs, builds a Flash animation output.
Oren Sreebny 