This EAR Geoinformatics Program grant supports a two year project to develop a community information model and related software to enable web based interoperability of earth observations derived from sensors and samples that span now discrete data and informatics initiatives for multiple communities. The system would target specific existing web service data repositories in order to demonstrate how the information model can support federation of earth observations data across multiple data publication systems. Specific repositories include the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS), EarthChem, the Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) Integrated Data Management System (CZOData), the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and the Data Observations Network for Earth (DataONE). The plan calls for collaboration with the related Pis of these projects (through subward support) to improve capture, sharing, and archival these data and associated metadata by building ontologies for describing, encoding and publishing data in common formats to allow interoperability. The plan involves community workshops to engage stakeholders and students in the design of the model. The model would incorporate international standards for data description and publishing utilizing Open Geospataial Consortium standards and domain specific markup languages. It is hoped that the results will feed directly into the larger EarthCube cyberinfrastructure initiative.
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