| NSF Org: |
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 16, 2012 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 11, 2016 |
| Award Number: | 1148453 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Rajiv Ramnath
OAC Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) CSE Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2012 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2018 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $2,401,939.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $2,401,939.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1000 OLD MAIN HL LOGAN UT US 84322-1000 (435)797-1226 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
UT US 84322-8200 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
ADVANCES IN BIO INFORMATICS, ECOSYSTEM STUDIES, Methodology, Measuremt & Stats, Hydrologic Sciences, EnvS-Environmtl Sustainability, PetaApps, CDI TYPE I |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
Water, its quality, quantity, accessibility, and management, is crucial to society. However, our ability to model and quantitatively understand the complex interwoven environmental processes that control water and its availability is severely hampered by inadequate tools related to hydrologic data discovery, systems integration, modeling/ simulation, and education. This project develops sustainable cyberinfrastructure for better access to water-related data and models in the hydrologic sciences, enabling hydrologists and other associated communities to collaborate and combine data and models from multiple sources. It will provide new ways in which hydrologic knowledge is created and applied to better understand water availability, quality, and dynamics. It will also help to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the interactions between natural and engineered aspects of the water cycle. These goals will be achieved through the development of interoperable cyberinfrastructure tools and the creation of an online collaborative environment, called HydroShare, which enables scientists to easily discover and access hydrologic and related data and models, retrieve them to their desktop, and perform analyses in a high performance computing environment. The software to be developed will take advantage of existing NSF cyberinfrastructure (iRODS, HUBzero, CSDMS, CUAHSI HIS) and be created as open source code. Its development will be end user-driven. In terms of broader impacts, the project builds essential infrastructure for science by developing software tools and computing environments to allow better understanding of the impacts of climate change (i.e., floods, droughts, biofuels, etc.) and to allow improved water resource development and the management of freshwater resources both above and below ground. Resulting software will be made publicly available and provides a strong student and workforce training/education component. In addition, the project supports an institution in an EPSCoR state and engages, as a PI, a person who is from a group under-represented in the sciences and engineering.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
This project established HydroShare, a website hosted at www.hydroshare.org that provides an online collaborative platform for sharing hydrologic data and models. HydroShare has specific functionality aimed at making collaboration easier for Hydrologists. It is a domain specific repository for the hydrology community that supports demands for open data, transparency and research reproducibility following the principles that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) to enhance trust in research.
The intellectual value of HydroShare is that it supports collaborative research in the Hydrologic Sciences. Advancing hydrologic understanding requires integration of information from multiple sources and analyses using diverse types of data and models that may be data and computationally intensive. HydroShare includes a repository for users to share and publish data and models in a variety of formats and to collaborate using this data. Beyond file sharing, we have added the capability for programs, tools, and web apps to act on content in HydroShare so that it becomes part of a web based platform for research. With HydroShare, users can: (1) share data and models with colleagues; (2) manage who has access to shared content; (3) share, access, visualize and manipulate a broad set of hydrologic data types and models; (4) use the web services application programming interface (API) to program automated and client access; (5) formally and permanently publish data and models to meet the requirements of research project data management plans; (6) discover and access data and models published by others; and (7) use web apps to visualize, analyze, and run models on data in HydroShare. The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) has taken over operation of HydroShare to sustain this system as cyberinfrastructure for the hydrology research community.
HydroShare’s functionality and architecture are organized into three categories (Fig. 1): (1) resource storage, (2) resource exploration, and (3) actions on resources. These functions are implemented using system components that interact through APIs. This design paradigm that uses loosely coupled services is an important intellectual contribution from this project because it enables anybody to develop a web app that can interact with resources stored in HydroShare and offers an opportunity for 3rd party and collaborator extension of and interoperability with the system. A number of app servers were established to serve the software tools that are part of HydroShare. We have used the Tethys Platform open source software to create an app portal at http://apps.hydroshare.org. Apps hosted at this portal, and elsewhere include: (1) National Water Model Forecast Viewer, (2) Data Rods Explorer to access NASA land surface model data, (3) JupyterHub platform for execution of Jupyter Notebooks that provide an effective way to document and make research analyses or modeling procedures reproducible, (4) OPeNDAP app that uses Unidata's Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services to enable access to multidimensional data in HydroShare and leverage substantial Unidata community software for working with data from these services, and (5) SWATShare app for sharing and executing Soil Water Assessment Tool models, a widely used Hydrologic Model.
Another intellectual merit contribution of HydroShare is the Resource Data Model (Fig 2) developed to enable storage and packaging of multiple data types and models with their metadata in an archivable, machine readable format for persistence of digital content and for interoperability with other systems. A “resource” is the discrete unit of digital content within HydroShare. Users may enter or edit metadata and organize the content of their resources using the range of content types supported, as well as grouping resources together into collections. This acknowledges the breadth and variety of data and models used by scientists and provides considerable flexibility in the way users can prepare their data for sharing in HydroShare. HydroShare uses the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) as its distributed network storage back end. iRODS provides a virtual file system for physical storage distributed across multiple locations and enables data federation across geographically dispersed institutions. This provides the opportunity for expansion of HydroShare storage beyond that provided by RENCI where HydroShare is currently hosted.
The broader impact of HydroShare is apparent through its usage (Fig 3.) which has grown since it was first deployed to where, as of 6/25/2018, there were 2606 registered user accounts. Fig 3 also shows the creation of new accounts and returning users who are active on the system (last 90 days) having created accounts prior to the last 90 days. The returning users (324 as of 6/25/18) indicate a growing community of researchers returning to use HydroShare on a regular basis. As of 6/25/18 there were over 5000 resources in HydroShare, of which 1522 were public and 104 permanently published and for which DOI’s had been registered. Registered users are from more than 60 CUAHSI member universities, indicating satisfactory penetration into the principal target research community.
Last Modified: 07/20/2018
Modified by: David G Tarboton
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