UCSB Geography’s Associate Professor Krzysztof Janowicz (“Jano”) is the Principal Investigator on two new grants.
The first is a 2-year NSF collaborative proposal titled “EarthCube IA: Collaborative Proposal: Cross-Domain Observational Metadata Environmental Sensing Network (X-DOMES)” (Jano is the UCSB PI; total funding: $55,288).
Abstract: Across-domains, agencies and political boundaries, our environment is being continuously observed and studied. The researchers in this project are looking for short-term, near-term and long-term changes while researching new and evolving methods to observe properties and to process the collected observations. Emerging technologies enable us to provide and discover the data openly and freely. But, if we do not understand the newly discovered data, with its inherent limitations and biases, it cannot be responsibly utilized for new or collaborative research efforts. Working with environmental sensor manufacturers and researchers, the X-DOMES project will develop tools and social and technical infrastructure to facilitate the creation of data about data (metadata). Metadata describes not only who, when, and where the observations were made, but also it must document how an observation came to be (provenance). By taking this knowledge out of manuals and human-readable documents, the X-DOMES model creates metadata that can be treated like data – discoverable and searchable, making it ready to be incorporated into automated archival and processing for quality assurance and validation methods.
Leveraging existing relationships with large NSF-funded data management programs, EarthCube building blocks and working groups, and environmental sensor manufacturers and consortia, we will establish a community of sensor manufacturers and other stakeholders to provide a unifying approach to describing sensors and observations across geo-science domains. Built on an existing sensor metadata model that references registered, standards-based vocabularies, the X-DOMES pilot project will provide a suite of tools, built upon community-adopted standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to demonstrate and facilitate the generation of documents that are discoverable and accessible on-line and/or directly from onboard sensor descriptions. The project will also demonstrate mechanisms to associate the data with the metadata through standards-based web services. With vendor-ready tools implemented throughout a broad-based community, the X-DOMES Network will lay the foundation for the development of and adoption of interoperable access to much needed content-rich sensor metadata.
Jano’s second grant is for a USGS sponsored proposal on developing and deploying a scaleable Linked Data platform for the National Map (http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/). Jano is the PI on this 1-year grant titled “I/UCRC: Collaborative Research: Center for Spatiotemporal Thinking and Computing Applications”; membership funding from USGS for the collaborative research project (funded by the NSF) is $61,920.
Abstract: The proposed project aims at providing Linked Data access to National Map vector data which resides in the ArcGIS Geodatabase format. These data include hydrography, transportation, structures, and boundaries. The project will address the challenge of how to efficiently make large data volumes available and queryable at the same times. Previous research and the PI’s experience suggest that in the context of the National Map, offering hundreds of Gigabyte of Linked Data via an unrestricted endpoint will not scale. To address this challenge a variety of methods will be tested to determine the sweet spot between data dumps, i.e., just storing huge RDF files for download, on the one side, and unrestricted public (Geo)SPARQL endpoints on the other side. Methods and combination of methods will include (Geo)SPARQL-SQL rewriting, transparent Web Service proxies for WFS, Linked Data Fragments, query optimization, restricted queries via a user interface, and so forth. The sweet spot will be defined as the method (or combination of methods) that enables common usage scenarios for Linked National Map Data, i.e., that is able to retain as much of the functionality that would be provided by having full Linked Data query access via a public endpoint while keeping server load and average query runtime (for common usage queries) at an acceptable level. A Web-based user interface will expose the resulting data and make them queryable and explorable via the follow-your-nose paradigm.
