1. Challenges and Achievements Presented by Cameron Kiddle Research Fellow, Grid Research Centre, University of Calgary

2. An on-line platform For: Earth Observation Scientists Facilitating: Collaboration between scientists Application access, management and sharing Data access, management and sharing Leveraging: Web 2.0 and social networking technologies Cloud computing technologies Semantic Web technologies Funded by: CANARIE - Network Enabled Platform (NEP-1) program Cybera (http://geochronos.org/)http://geochronos.org/ OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 2

3. Project Team OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 3 Dr. Arturo Sanchez-Azofeifa University of Alberta Dr. John Gamon University of Alberta Dr. Benoit Rivard University of Alberta Dr. Rob Simmonds University of Calgary Prinicipal Investigators Project CoordinationPlatform DevelopmentDomain Scientists

4. Virtual Organization OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 4

5. Existing cyberinfrastructure tools / services are at different stages of development Rare that something works out of the box Dont quite do what you need them to do Often lacking in fault tolerance / interoperability Significant integration efforts required Challenges - General OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 5

6. Finding a platform that meets all of the scientists needs Tried various platforms (Facebook, Ning) before settling on Elgg Providing simple / intuitive user interfaces Difficult maintaining balance between simplicity and functionality Challenges - Collaboration OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 6

7. Unique challenges in managing cloud platforms (virtualization) Greater flexibility but more points of failure Software licence restrictions Many software licences do not support software-as-a-service model Challenges - Applications OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 7

8. Large variety of data from many sources Lack of / insufficient metadata standards Automated data acquisition inhibited by human-in-the-loop processes Challenges - Data OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 8

9. Achievements – Collaboration Social networking portal Elgg-based (elgg.org) Social networking services Blogs Tags Media/document sharing Wikis Friends/contacts Groups Discussions Message boards Calendars Status Activity Feeds OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 http://geochronos.org/ 9

10. Achievements - Applications Interactive Application Service (IAS) On-line, on-demand access to scientific applications Share application sessions and data with other users Access control to applications Hosted on top of a cloud computing platform (ASPEN) that can dynamically provision resources on-demand OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 10

11. Achievements - Data Spectral Libraries Store, share and browse spectral data Manage metadata for spectra Create and share metadata schemas View spectral plots, metadata, ancillary files and maps OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 11

12. Collaboration Additional Elgg plugins to further enable collaboration Publications, presentations... Open portal to public (later this year) Applications Batch processing and automated workflow services Handle longer running data processing tasks and simulations Automate data workflows (i.e., mosaic, reproject and subset MODIS data) Data Generalization of spectral library solution Acquire, store, manage, browse and share other types of data Employment of Semantic Web technologies better link / relate data and enable ontological mapping between metadata standards Work in Progress OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 12

13. Contact Information OGF28 Mar. 15-18, 2010 13 http://geochronos.org/ info@geochronos.org http://grid.ucalgary.ca/http://ceos.ualberta.ca/http://www.cybera.ca/ Cameron Kiddle kiddlec@cpsc.ucalgary.ca http://pages.cspc.ucalgary.ca/~kiddlec/