The HydroShare community platform supporting water resources research

Presentation for Science Gateway Computational Institute Federal Agency Workshop, Washington DC, March 4, 2020

HydroShare is a web based hydrologic information system operated by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc. (CUAHSI) to advance hydrologic science by enabling individual researchers to more easily and freely share products resulting from their research, not just the scientific publication summarizing a study, but also the data and models used to create the scientific publication. HydroShare accepts data from anybody, and supports Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) principles. It is comprised of two sets of functionalities: (1) a repository for users to share and publish data and models in a variety of formats, and (2) tools (web apps) that can act on content in HydroShare and support web-based access to compute capability. Together these move us towards a platform for collaboration and computation that integrates data storage, organization, discovery, and analysis through web applications (web apps) and that allows researchers to employ services beyond the desktop to make data storage and manipulation more reliable and scalable, while improving their ability to collaborate and reproduce results. This presentation describes HydroShare and how it fits into the broader cyberinfrastructure software ecosystem where interoperability is important as a gateway for computation, and some of the challenges faced, from both an organizational and technical perspective.