Open Source Cyberinfrastructure to Simplify the Development and Deployment of Environmental Modelling Web Applications

Welcome to the age of the Water Data Deluge – certainly the most amazing period in human history to be a water resources scientist or environmental engineer! It is a peculiar and amazing time characterized by the creation, on a daily basis, of massive quantities of data and information that dwarf the world’s complete water data catalog of only a decade or two earlier. It is a time when an individual scientist with the most basic and inexpensive hardware and software can build a data collection network that can generate a veritable flood of information about the environment. So, what do we do with all of this data? How do we store, retrieve, visualize, document, cite, and make sense of environmental observations that quickly grow from the hundreds of thousands of values to the millions of values? What do we do when these counts escalate into to the billions or trillions of observations? Certainly a new generation of cyberinfrastructure is needed to help manage and interpret such data. In the United States, the National Science Foundation has funded a series of projects and programs centered on improved scientific cyberinfrastructure with the goal of creating a large ecosystem of tools and technologies that can help address these problems. This presentation will examine two such projects presently underway at Brigham Young University, including HydroShare: a system for community collaboration and data sharing in the cloud; and Tethys Platform: open source tools for rapid development and deployment of water and environmental web apps.

欢迎步入水数据洪流的时代——这无疑是人类历史上最为神奇的一段时期，成为水资源科学家或环境工程师。这是一个独特而令人惊叹的时代，每日都有巨量的数据和信息被创造出来，其规模已超越仅十年或二十年前的全球完整水数据目录。这是一个即便是最基础的硬件和软件也足以构建一个数据收集网络，从而产生关于环境的丰富信息的时代。然而，面对如此庞大的数据量，我们该如何应对？如何存储、检索、可视化、记录、引用，并解析那些从数万到数百万的快速增长的观测数据？当观测数据的数量攀升至数十亿甚至数万亿时，我们又该如何应对？显然，我们需要新一代的计算机网络基础设施来帮助管理和解读这些数据。在美国，美国国家科学基金会已资助了一系列以提升科学计算机网络基础设施为核心的项目和计划，旨在构建一个庞大的工具和技术生态系统，以解决这些问题。本次演讲将探讨在杨百翰大学进行的两个此类项目，包括HydroShare：一个云端的社区协作和数据共享系统；以及Tethys Platform：用于快速开发和部署水与环境网络应用的开源工具。