A Collaboration Tool to Support Modeling Groups Donald W. Denbo JISAO/UW-NOAA/PMEL 20 th IIPS/AMS, 12 – 15 January, 2004, Seattle, WA

January 13, Introduction Modeling groups within NOAA involve geographically distributed research partners. Close collaborations involve frequent discussions of input data and model results. Face-to-face meetings are both time consuming and costly. Solution: Create a collaboration tool that enable scientists in separate locations to effectively and efficiently work together.

January 13, Design Goals Synchronous collaboration: Enable scientists to interactively explore and annotate data and model results and have colleagues at other locations interact in real-time. Asynchronous collaboration: Enable longer- term on-line discussions where scientists may participate at a time of their convenience. Requirements derive from the model development, testing, and validations needs.

January 13, Scientific Features Flexible, interactive graphical displays of data and metadata. –Parametric plots (e.g., temp-salinity) –Flexible mapping of independent variables to axes. –Vector plots, animations, 3D visualizations. –Publication quality graphics.

January 13, Remote netCDF file access (OPeNDAP). Multi-platform support. (Unix, Linux, Windows) Ocean/atmospheric model vertical coordinate systems Extract arbitrary sections from ocean model results. Support for statistical and graphical comparisons between station data and gridded model results. Import and export data to local files.

January 13, Basic Collaboration Features Work with all collaborators on-line simultaneously. Sessions are retained by default and can be re-entered later. Access to local and remote data and model results. Date/Time and user stamp all actions.

January 13, Advanced Collaboration Features Allow secure sessions (encrypted). Restrict a session to specific individuals. Enable access to a secure session after the session creator has logged out. Archive/restore sessions, allow session renaming. Session editing: remove redundant objects. Retain participant activity logs by session. Bookmarks.

January 13, Approach To meet the collaborative needs, we are building upon existing projects: OceanShare, a collaborative tool, the Climate Data Portal, a OPeNDAP in situ Data Server, ncBrowse, a netCDF file browser, and SGT Beans, an easy-to- use graphical application development environment.

January 13, Architecture OceanShare: responsibilities include coordinating between the subsystems, printing, and handling user interactions. Data Access: designed so additional data resources can be easily added. Computation: a scripting environment, using Jython, for user defined computation and customization. Graphics: SGT version 3.0 provides basic graphics support. Collaboration: provided using JINI/JavaSpaces toolkit and Outrigger for persistent storage.

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References “NcBrowse: OPeNDAP Server Access and 3D Graphics.”, 19th IIPS, Feb 2003, Long Beach, CA.“NcBrowse: OPeNDAP Server Access and 3D Graphics.”, “Plug and Play Scientific Graphics with SGT.”, NOAARearch WebShop 2003, Longmont, CO.“Plug and Play Scientific Graphics with SGT.”, “Fisheries Oceanography Collaboration Software.”, 18th IIPS, Jan 2002, Orlando, FL.“Fisheries Oceanography Collaboration Software.”, “ncBrowse: A Graphical netCDF File Browser.”, AGU 2002 Western pacific Geophysics Meeting, Wellington, NZ.“ncBrowse: A Graphical netCDF File Browser.”,