Data and Models as Social Objects in the HydroShare System for Collaboration in the Hydrology Community

Presentation given to IAHS Scientific Assembly in Port Elizabeth, July 14, 2017

Researchers around the world expend tremendous resources to gather and analyze vast stores of hydrologic data and use them in a myriad of hydrologic models. The goal of HydroShare is to advance hydrologic science by enabling the scientific community 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 is a web-based hydrologic information system developed with the goal of sharing, accessing and discovering hydrologic data and models with specific functionality aimed at making collaboration easier and supporting reproducibility, and thus trust in research results. HydroShare has been developed with U.S. National Science Foundation support under the auspices of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) to support the collaboration and community cyberinfrastructure needs of the hydrology research community. Within HydroShare, we have developed new functionality for creating datasets, describing them with metadata, and sharing them with collaborators. We cast hydrologic datasets and models as “social objects” that can be shared, collaborated around, annotated, published and discovered. In addition to data and model sharing, HydroShare supports web application programs (apps) that can act on data stored in HydroShare, just as software programs on your PC act on your data locally. This can free you from some of the limitations of local computing capacity and challenges in installing and maintaining software on your own PC. HydroShare’s web-based cyberinfrastructure can take work off your desk or laptop computer and onto infrastructure or "cloud" based data and processing servers. This presentation will describe HydroShare’s collaboration functionality that enables both public and private sharing with individual users and collaborative user groups, and makes it easier for collaborators to iterate on shared datasets and models, creating multiple versions along the way, and publishing them with a permanent landing page, metadata description, and citable Digital Object Identifier (DOI) when the work is complete. This presentation will also describe the web app architecture that supports interoperability with third party servers functioning as application engines for analysis and processing of big hydrologic datasets.

在2017年7月14日于东伦敦港市举行的国际水文科学协会科学大会上，全球研究人员投入了巨大的资源以收集和分析大量的水文数据，并将其应用于各式各样的水文模型之中。HydroShare旨在通过促进科学界更便捷、更自由地共享研究成果，从而推动水文科学的发展。这不仅包括总结研究的科学出版物，还包括用于创建科学出版物的数据和模型。HydroShare是一个基于网络的 hydrologic 信息系统，旨在共享、访问和发现水文数据和模型，其特定功能旨在简化协作并支持可重复性，从而增强对研究结果的信任。HydroShare是在美国国家科学基金会（NSF）的支持下，由大学推进水文科学协会（CUAHSI）发起开发，以支持水文研究社区的协作和社区计算基础设施需求。在HydroShare中，我们开发了创建数据集、用元数据描述它们以及与合作伙伴共享的新功能。我们将水文数据集和模型视为可共享、协作、注释、发布和发现的“社会对象”。除了数据与模型共享之外，HydroShare还支持作用于HydroShare中存储数据的Web应用程序（app），就如同您在个人电脑上运行的软件程序作用于本地数据一样。这可以免除您在本地计算能力以及在自己的个人电脑上安装和维护软件的局限和挑战。HydroShare的基于网络的计算基础设施可以将工作从您的桌面或笔记本电脑上移至基于基础设施或“云”的数据和计算服务器。本演示将介绍HydroShare的协作功能，该功能允许与个人用户和协作用户组进行公开和私有共享，并使协作者更容易对共享的数据集和模型进行迭代，创建多个版本，并在工作完成后通过永久性的着陆页、元数据描述和可引用的数字对象标识符（DOI）进行发布。本演示还将描述支持与第三方服务器互操作性的Web应用程序架构，这些第三方服务器作为分析处理大型水文数据集的应用程序引擎。