Genomics, bioinformatics, and allied technologies are having wide-sweeping and dramatic impact on observation and experimentation in ocean science. "Omics" technologies and approaches are being rapidly adopted and employed by the ocean science research community. "Omics" are being broadly and effectively used in areas that include mapping the distributions of taxa and biogeography, time series analyses and biogeochemistry, regional process studies, assessing environmental change and anthropogenic impacts, and ecosystem modeling. Rapidly evolving technologies combined with exponentially decreasing costs have "democratized" DNA sequencing and are enabling the generation of massive ocean "omic" datasets by individual researchers, and collaborative efforts by the ocean science community as a whole. These massive "omic" datasets and their associated metadata require new cyberinfrastructures (CI) that can coordinate and facilitate data and metadata access, analyses, and modeling. The NSF EarthCube initiative recently solicited proposals for domain workshops "designed to listen to the needs of the end-user groups that make up the geosciences and to understand better how data-enabled science can help them achieve their scientific goals." This workshop will bring together ocean scientists and computer scientists to inform and engage them about EarthCube activities with the following objectives: 1. Inform and engage 40-45 ocean scientists with CI experience and/or needs, and explore potential Earth cube opportunities to help solve common CI challenges and needs for ocean "omic" data mining and analyses. 2. Inform and engage 10-15 bioinformatic and CI scientists about ocean "omics" needs and applications and opportunities in EarthCube activities to help address them. The overall goal of the workshop would be to develop a set of unifying CI requirements of ocean "omic" scientists, that could integrate their data and efforts, and connect and engage both domain and cyber scientists to pursue cyber solutions for ocean "omics" analyses. Intellectual Merit : The workshop will engage of a broad "omic" data user group in the ocean science community that stands to benefit from understanding new cyber-infrastructure possibilities, envisioning present and future solutions to their current needs and engaging in the EarthCube process. The EarthCube cyberscience community will benefit from understanding the challenges and needs of a broad, rapidly evolving, multidisciplinary group of ocean science omic and environmental data users. Broader Impacts : Cyber-infrastructure developed for ocean "omic" scientists have potential for broad public impact. Examples include improved infrastructures to develop more accurate climate models that incorporate biological processes, improve our understanding of the effects of environmental change, expand our knowledge of life in extreme habitats, and better assess ecosystem structure, function and dynamics.
The National Science Foundation’s EarthCube End User Workshop was held at USC Wrigley Marine Science Center on Catalina Island, California in August 2013. The workshop was designed to explore and characterize the needs and tools available to the community that is focusing on microbial and physical oceanography research with a particular emphasis on ‘omic research. The assembled researchers outlined the existing concerns regarding the vast data resources that are being generated, and how we will deal with these resources as their volume and diversity increases. Particular attention was focused on the tools for handling and analyzing the existing data, on the need for the construction and curation of diverse federated databases, as well as development of shared, interoperable, "big-data capable" analytical tools. The key outputs from this workshop include (i) critical scientific challenges and cyber infrastructure constraints, (ii) the current and future ocean ‘omics science grand challenges and questions, and (iii) data management, analytical and associated and cyber-infrastructure capabilities required to meet critical current and future scientific challenges. The main thrust of the meeting and the outcome of this report is a definition of the ‘omics tools, technologies and infrastructures that facilitate continued advance in ocean science biology, marine biogeochemistry, and biological oceanography.
