| Abstract: |
The Consortium for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences Inc, CUAHSI, has been developing CyberInfrastructure components for deployment at environmental observatories with the aim of providing information technology that constitute the underpinning of the WATERs network. The observatories forming the network vary in size and are spatially distributed across the US. As part of the CBEO effort the network team has installed the CUAHSI CI components so the CBEO constitutes a node within the WATERs network. In contrast to the CBEO:Testbed team that aims to place all data available side by side (one DB instance for each source) into a server without emphasis or provisions for public access, querying interfaces, common standards or adherence to agreed upon metadata descriptions among the data sources the CBEO:Network team set out to integrate all data sources into the CUAHSI Observations Data Model ODM DB installation for nationwide network integration.
The integration effort has posed numerous challenges to the team because of the vast differences between the data sets. These challenges concern the volume of data that needs to be ingested into the system node, the descriptions standards used, the spatial locations at where the data has been collected to semantic heterogeneities when labeling the data and also substantial syntactic differences in terms how data is stored (for example DB vs EXCEL spreadsheets) and how it can be accessed (online or via personal request as Email attachment). It also poses the need for automatic updating (or harvesting) schedules for those data sources that support and store data from continuous collection efforts.
In this presentation we seek to provide an overview of what data srouces have been harvested and included ino the CBEO node, such as CIMS, MAST, RIM, but also regional cut outs from national data sets such as NADP, MPE, and Hydro_NEXRAD. We will focus on the required modifications and interpretations to include all required metadata, what it took to implement them into the ODM node, what coverage is available and how this data can accessed via web-services and web interfaces.
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