| NSF Org: |
RISE Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER) |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 28, 2015 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 28, 2015 |
| Award Number: | 1541057 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Eva Zanzerkia
RISE Integrative and Collaborative Education and Research (ICER) GEO Directorate for Geosciences |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2015 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2017 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $517,718.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $517,718.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
333 RAVENSWOOD AVE MENLO PARK CA US 94025-3493 (609)734-2285 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
CA US 94025-3493 |
| 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): | EarthCube |
| 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): | 47.050 |
ABSTRACT
The habitability of planet Earth depends on a complex interaction between interior regions, solid surface, oceans, atmosphere, near-earth space environment, and Sun. Yet, study of this Sun-Earth system is traditionally broken up into separate geoscience disciplines, so that progress can be made by scientists working in reasonably-sized communities that share a common language and base of knowledge. To broach the bigger question of the interaction of the subsystems studied by the separate communities, it is necessary to overcome the barriers of communication posed by different observational instruments, software tools for interpreting data, and modeling methods. In answer to this challenge, the Integrated Geoscience Observatory is a pilot project that creates an online platform for integrating data and associated software tools contributed by separate geoscience research communities, into a unified toolset that brings them together. The vision is to expand the individual domains of geoscience research toward study of the whole Sun-Earth system, and in so doing to uncover the system level effects critical to the habitability of planet Earth.
EarthCube aims to develop a framework for assisting researchers in understanding the Earth system. This systems science challenge is recognized in the Decadal Survey in Solar and Space Physics [2012], with the conclusion "Data from diverse space- and ground-based instruments need to be routinely combined in order to maximize their multi-scale potential." The Integrated Geoscience Observatory is a pilot project that explores realization of this vision by focusing on the limited context of geospace research. The observatory creates an integrated package of software tools contributed by researchers with specific capabilities, and designed to enable integration of diverse observational data. Features of the toolkit include: (A) linking diverse data sets from multiple data repositories and automatically mapping them to a common user-specified coordinate grid; (B) implementing the well-known Assimilative Mapping of Ionospheric Electrodynamics (AMIE) procedure for assimilation of this data to yield a global picture; and (C) utilization of the EarthCube building blocks GeoSoft, for communicating ontology, and GeoDataspace, for attributing credit to contributors through publication of processed data. The toolset can be accessed and used either through a web-based computing environment, or through download packages for local installation, with a nearly seamless transition between the two.
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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.
The Integrated Geoscience Observatory (InGeO) is an initiative to enable the integration of diverse data from disparate geospace science instruments, make a well-known ionospheric data assimilation model accessible to the larger community, and stimulate larger conversation within the geospace science community on data and software practices. The outcomes of this project fall to two broad categories, software platform and community initiatives.
Software platform: The InGeO software platform allows geospace scientists to discover, access, and analyze geospatial data pertaining to ionosphere from ground-based instruments like HF radars and imaging cameras. This is complemented by a data assimilation model that uses the data from HF radars to predict electric field potential in polar latitudes. As a result, the scientists can compare and contrast the data from observational instruments and the predictive model on the same software platform. The software platform is built with a Python backend and has a JupyterHub interface. The platform includes several Python libraries, including those developed for processing specific data, and the assimilative model. Typically, it is difficult for users with varying technical expertise to install custom Python libraries with many dependencies on their local machines. The InGeO system takes care of this problem.
The InGeO platform offers a space where custom Python libraries developed by geospace scientists can be used by a wider user base while providing credit for the developers. The assimilative model interface is the first of its kind to be made available as an accessible way to run a model. Prior to InGeO, it could be run only by the developers.
Community initiatives: The InGeO team conducted significant community outreach during the two years of the project. We organized special sessions and plenary tutorials at geospace science conferences on the subject of best practices for data and software stewardship, which is especially important towards the goal of reproducible science. This goal requires basic cyberinfrastructure and community consensus on the adoption of best practices. Towards this, we developed a white paper describing best practices intending to stimulate community-wide discussions and authored a paper on 'Ushering new frontier in geospace through data science'.
Intellectual merit: This project was to develop a collaborative platform for geospace science that removes the barriers to doing coordinated science involving multiple instruments, and to create an easily run a data assimilation model that gives predictive results. Before InGeO, a user would have to approach each individual instrument data provider and learn how to process data before being able to actually use the data for research. Similarly, to run a data assimilation model such as Assimilative Mapping of Ionospheric Electrodynamics (AMIE), the user would have to approach the model developers, who are oversubscribed with requests to run this popular model. With InGeO, processed data and the software to analyze it in the context of other instruments are already provided by the instrument data providers. Similarly, an open source (Python) version of AMIE was developed under this project and made available to users to run online version of AMIE. Both of these accomplishments have facilitated geospace scientists' access to observational data and predictive models and their ability to conduct comparative analyses, leading to improved, more reproducible, and more accurate science results.
Broader Impacts: The community outreach done by the InGeO team has resulted in a greater awareness in the geospace community about the issues of reproducible research and the role of data and software practices in reproducibility. The white paper that resulted from this project was discussed by several members of the community and is in the ongoing process of being updated as the discourse deepens.
Last Modified: 04/13/2018
Modified by: Asti Bhatt
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