Water sustainability is a grand challenge problem that can only be addressed as a collaborative effort of a community of research communities who study water from many different perspectives. To date, progress on grand challenge-scale water research has been hindered by a lack of interoperability among data and computing resources that in-turn stems from a lack of coordination and rigor in software development practices across the water science community. This project formalizes and expands planning efforts initiated by a fall 2010 workshop on software challenges of the NSF's Environmental Observatory Networks (NSF Award #1049273) to develop a Scientific Software Innovation Institute (S2I2) centered on water science and environmental observation. The plan will guide formation of a Water Science Software Institute (WSSI) that addresses the community's interoperability problem by using Open Source principles to enable innovative and sustainable scientific software.
The project involves two main activities: 1) determining the scope and the cyberinfrastructure requirements of the water science the WSSI addresses, and 2) developing a plan to apply the Open Source community model to this community of scientific research communities. To guide planning activities, two driving use cases are investigated: evaluating watershed best management practices, and understanding nitrogen dynamics and the impact of ecological patch structure. The use cases provide a source of cyberinfrastructure requirements and targets against which to evaluate the plan as it develops. The planning process mitigates the risks inherent in standing up this new kind of software institute, and it is a first step toward demonstrating how a software institute will transform water science.
(Award #1151982, Ahalt PI), was to begin the process of planning a new kind of software institute—an institute that by its activities will both enable new and accelerate the pace of scientific research in the broad area of water science by improving the quality, interoperability, and reusability of elements of research cyberinfrastructure: computational software, analysis software, models, and management of observed data and simulation data. A distinguishing feature of the institute we are planning is that it will be operated using principles associated with open source software—open access, mutual benefit, and rights and responsibilities. Other guiding principles will be using real water science problems to drive our cyberinfrastructure development and using the spiral development model and agile software development techniques to manage our work. The Intellectual Merit of the work was 1) identifying a related set of three grand-challenge water sustainability problems and identifying both common and unique cyberinfrastructure requirements of each and 2) developing plans for how we will apply open source (and our other guiding principles) in the operation and governance of our institute. An important aspect of the work was frequent and in depth interaction with stakeholders in the water science communities, with experts in cyberinfrastructure, and with industrial advisors on the use of open source mechanics in management and in promoting best-practices in software engineering. The work done under this award is already having a Broader Impact: as the project participants interact with our colleagues we describe and test our ideas on them. An example is the development of ideas about open source science that was developed under this EAGER and repurposed as an EarthCube white paper. The real impact of our institute will be on the scientists whose work is accelerated and enabled by our work and in the guidelines we can provide to other software institutes based on our experiences. We continue to work toward the implementation phase. The Outcomes of this EAGER award include: Identification of three science themes followed by in depth literature reviews in the three areas and synthesis across these reviews to identify common and unique computing needs. This work resulted in an Abstract presented at the AGU Fall Meeting 2012; a paper is in preparation. We have prepared white papers presenting ideas about organizing and running a software institute using open source principles. The figure included shows our December 2011 thinking about the cyclic nature of how – with frequent community engagement - grand challenge science drives development of new computer science and how new computer science enables scientific research that could not be attempted previously. Two RAs and a Post Doc have had the educational opportunity of working on a cross-disciplinary science problem and learning to work in a cross-disciplinary team.
