GEONgrid Portal

Geon: Cyberinfrastructure for the GeoSciences

The GEON (GEOscience Network) research project is responding to the pressing need in the geosciences to interlink and share multidisciplinary data sets to understand the complex dynamics of Earth systems. To rise to this challenge, we have formed a coalition of IT researchers, representing key technology areas, and Earth Science researchers, representing a broad cross-section of Earth Science sub-disciplines. The need to manage the vast amounts of Earth science data was recognized through NSF-sponsored meetings, which gave birth to the Geoinformatics initiative. The creation of GEON will provide the critical initial infrastructure necessary to facilitate Geoinformatics and other research initiatives, such as EarthScope.

Creating the GEON cyberinfrastructure to integrate, analyze, and model 4D data poses fundamental IT research challenges due to the extreme heterogeneity of geoscience data formats, storage and computing systems and, most importantly, the ubiquity of "hidden semantics" and differing conventions, terminologies, and ontological frameworks across disciplines. GEON IT research focuses on modeling, indexing, semantic mediation, and visualization of multi-scale 4D data, and creation of a prototype GEONgrid, to provide the geoscience community an IT head start in facing the research challenges posed by understanding the complex dynamics of Earth systems. An important contribution will be embarking on the definition of a Unified Geosciences Language System (UGLS), to enable semantic interoperability. The GEONgrid leverages experience gained in the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) program, and the TeraGrid Distributed Terascale Facility. We will create a portal to provide access to the GEON environment, which will include advanced query interfaces to distributed, semantically-integrated databases, Web-enabled access to shared tools, and seamless access to distributed computational, storage, and visualization resources and data archives.

Two testbed regions, the mid-Atlantic and the Rocky Mountains, have been identified to define the GEON geoscience challenges, though the system will be able to accommodate national and international research activities. These testbed regions were selected due to the variety of geological issues embodied within them requiring interlinking of multiple disciplinary databases and also because they are areas of expertise for the GEON geoscience research team. The results of GEON research will significantly impact large multi-scale geoscience research programs such as Earthscope, as well as individuals and smaller groups of researchers, thereby leading to an intellectual transformation of the entire science. Recognizing this potential, the U.S.Geological Survey has joined as a major partner and has made creation of key GEON databases a priority effort over the next several years. Via DLESE, GEON will become an important resource for sharing knowledge about the Earth for a variety of audiences, including K-12 students and teachers.

Many disciplinary geoscience database projects are already underway, indicating the readiness of the community to participate in such a national-scale effort. As NSF and other agencies begin to invest in these database creation efforts, a need for a cyberinfrastructure that will enable integration of these databases becomes imminent. Various GEON-like grid efforts, such as GriPhyN, NEESGrid, and BIRN, have all indicated the readiness of the IT community to provide the necessary interoperable infrastructure, and testify to the value of integration of IT with major science and education initiatives. It is now the opportune moment to start the GEON program, to herald the geosciences into the era of Geoinformatics and accelerate geoscience research in a timely manner. In sum, GEON is an IT-based Geoscience revolution that will play a critical role in a more holistic understanding of the dynamics of Earth systems. It will also create new scientific paradigms and renew the excitement in the community of the post-plate tectonics era.

For more information: http://www.geongrid.org