HydroShare: A Platform for Collaborative Data and Model Sharing in Hydrology

This is the poster presented at the Earthcube all hands meeting June 7, 2017.

HydroShare is an online, collaboration system for sharing hydrologic data, analytical tools, and models. It supports the sharing of and collaboration around “resources” which are defined by standardized content types for data formats and models commonly used in hydrology. Currently, with HydroShare you can: share your data and models with colleagues; manage who has access to the content that you share; share, access, visualize, and manipulate a broad set of hydrologic data types and models; publish data and models and obtain a citable digital object identifier (DOI); aggregate your resources into collections; discover and access data and models published by others; use the web services application programming interface (API) to programmatically access resources; and use integrated web applications to visualize, analyze and run models on data in HydroShare. Composite resources allow multiple file types from a study to be combined together, providing, as a single resource, an aggregation of all the data elements associated with a model or study. Hydroshare’s composite resource construct can be used to support software that enables transparency and reproducibility, and thereby enhance trust in the research findings. Toward this, as part of the EarthCube GeoTrust project we are investigating how the composite resource construct can be extended to support transparency and reproducibility. The EarthCube GeoTrust project is creating “geounits” which are self-contained packages of computational experiments that can be guaranteed to repeat or reproduce regardless of deployment issues. Since geounits provide a complete description of all the data elements with an instance (run) of a computational experiment, including input files, parameter files, the model executable, associated libraries, and output files produced, they can be mapped to a specialization of HydroShare’s composite resource type. This has a direct effect of transforming HydroShare into a repository of geounits, and making published and cited experiments not only accessible but also reproducible, thereby enhancing trust in them. Tools that create geounits use HydroShare’s REST API to load them into HydroShare, where they can then be shared with other users and downloaded for reproduction of the computational experiment, or further research with additional or alternate data. This presentation will describe the functionality and architecture of HydroShare that enables the creation of geounits comprising: (1) resource storage, (2) resource exploration, and (3) actions on resources by web applications. HydroShare’s components are loosely coupled and interact through APIs, which enhances robustness, as components can be upgraded and advanced relatively independently. The full power of this paradigm is the extensibility it supports, in that anybody can develop a web application that interacts with resources stored in HydroShare. We welcome discussion of the opportunities this enables for interoperability with other EarthCube tools, to the benefit of the geoscience research community.

本海报于2017年6月7日在Earthcube全体会议中展出。HydroShare是一个在线协作系统，旨在共享水文数据、分析工具和模型。该系统支持基于标准化内容类型的数据格式和模型，这些格式和模型在水文领域中被广泛使用。目前，通过HydroShare，您可以：与同事共享您的数据和模型；管理对您所共享内容的访问权限；共享、访问、可视化和操作一系列水文数据类型和模型；发布数据和模型并获得可引用的数字对象标识符（DOI）；将资源聚合为集合；发现并访问他人发布的数据和模型；利用网络服务应用程序编程接口（API）以编程方式访问资源；并使用集成网络应用程序在HydroShare中的数据上可视化、分析和运行模型。复合资源允许将研究中的多种文件类型组合在一起，作为一个单一的资源，提供与模型或研究相关的所有数据元素的聚合。HydroShare的复合资源结构可用于支持透明性和可重现性的软件，从而增强对研究发现的信任。为此，作为EarthCube GeoTrust项目的一部分，我们正在研究如何扩展复合资源结构以支持透明性和可重现性。EarthCube GeoTrust项目正在创建“地质单元”，这些是包含计算实验的独立包，可以保证在部署问题下也能重复或再现。由于地质单元提供了与计算实验实例（运行）相关的所有数据元素的完整描述，包括输入文件、参数文件、模型可执行文件、相关库和输出文件，因此它们可以映射到HydroShare复合资源类型的特化。这直接将HydroShare转变为地质单元的存储库，并使已发布和引用的实验不仅可访问，而且可重现，从而增强了对它们的信任。创建地质单元的工具使用HydroShare的REST API将它们加载到HydroShare中，然后可以与其他用户共享，并下载用于重现计算实验或使用附加或替代数据进行进一步研究的副本。本演示将描述HydroShare的功能和架构，这些功能和架构使得创建包含以下内容的地质单元成为可能：（1）资源存储，（2）资源探索，以及（3）通过网络应用程序对资源采取的行动。HydroShare的组件松散耦合，并通过API进行交互，这增强了系统的鲁棒性，因为组件可以相对独立地进行升级和改进。这一范式全力的优势在于其支持的可扩展性，即任何人都可以开发一个与HydroShare中存储的资源交互的网络应用程序。我们欢迎讨论这为与其他EarthCube工具的互操作性带来的机遇，从而造福地球科学研究界。