The GEOscience Network (GEON) project seeks to bring leading-edge information management research to bear on creating a cyberinfrastructure for the solid earth geosciences to interlink multidisciplinary geoscience data sets in 4D space. The need to manage the growing amounts of diverse Earth science data has been recognized through a series of NSF-sponsored community meetings on Geoinformatics. The GEON collaboration between IT researchers, who represent key technology areas relevant to GEON, and Earth science researchers, who represent a broad cross section of Earth science sub-disciplines, will provide the foundation for a national Geoinformatics program.
There is a pressing need in the Earth sciences for a national information infrastructure that enables the community to share databases and tools to enable interdisciplinary analysis of networked data sets in studying a wide range of phenomena including the interplay between tectonics and the evolution of sedimentary basins; the role of mountain building in the evolution of climate and life; broader predictive understanding and modeling capabilities of geologic hazards, such as earthquakes and volcanoes; the 4D reconstruction of the Earth through time; and, managing the natural resources of our planet. Each of these problems requires interdisciplinary research to discover relationships among Earth science disciplines, and depends on the community's ability to construct an integrated geoscience information system. The goal of GEON is to develop the necessary IT foundations and create such a system.
Many past and on-going projects in the geosciences have produced valuable sub-disciplinary and disciplinary databases. Numerous national centers and organizations such as IRIS, UNAVCO, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), as well as government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), are contributing research and data to the community. Building on this base, the imperative now is to take a step beyond research resulting in disciplinary databases, towards a new paradigm for interdisciplinary information integration and tool sharing via the creation of the GEON cyberinfrastructure. The research products and services arising from GEON will be available to the entire scientific community and will transform the way in which geoscience research is conducted, opening unprecedented avenues for research and collaboration and providing the foundation for creating geoscience collaboratories. ***
