Data management: JGOFS/GLOBEC geospatial interface

Groman, Bob

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Abstract

The U.S. GLOBEC Data Management Office is responsible for managing the data collected by the Georges Bank, Northeast Pacific and Southern Ocean programs of the U.S. GLOBEC project and making these data available on-line. Currently, we have over 775 Georges Bank data sets, 157 Southern Ocean data sets and 437 data sets from the Northeast Pacific programs. The US JGOFS/US GLOBEC data management system is used to serve these data via the and is accessible to anyone having access to the Internet and any stand Web browser, such as Internet Explorer, Mozila, Netscape, Firefox and Safari. We encourage scientific investigators to serve their own data but will serve their data from the central data server, globec.whoi.edu, if they prefer. Current activities included on-going quality control, adding new data and modeling results to the data system, adding data reports and presentations to the web sites, and improving overall access to the data.

Currently, the interface to the system is a table or directory, organized by project, program and/or year depending on the preferences of each of the programs. (See http://globec.whoi.edu) But there is interest in making the interface to the data geographically based and we have begun to implement this interface using MapServer software. For a preliminary view of this interface, showing the data from the Georges Bank program, see http://mapservice.whoi.edu/maps-bin/globec/map. By the end of November we hope to have all three projects accessible via this interface. In addition, we are adding interoperability enhancements to the data management system to facilitate access to these data from other sites and portal. To accomplish this, we are converting our human readable metadata records to machine readable, XML encoded, files using the FGDC metadata standard. Also, we are adding to our ability to download data. Currently, people can download data in ASCII comma and tab separated files, flat files, Matlab binary files, and as ZIP and tar files. We are adding the ability to access these data using the Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Map Service and Web Feature Service protocols.

To help analyze data, we recently released version 3.0 of the EasyKrig Matlab based kriging software. The EasyKrig program package uses a Graphical User Interface (GUI). It requires MATLAB 5.3 or higher with or without the optimization toolbox and consists of five components, or processing stages: (1) data preparation, (2) variogram computation, (3) kriging, (4) visualization and (5) saving results. It allows the user to process anisotropic data, select an appropriate model from a list of variogram models, and a choice of kriging methods, as well as associated kriging parameters. One of the major advantages of this program package is that the program minimizes the users' requirements to "guess" the initial parameters and automatically generates the required default parameters. In addition, because it uses a GUI, the modifications of the initial parameter settings can be easily performed. Another feature of this program package is that it has a built-in on-line help library that allows the user to obtain the descriptions of the use of parameters and operational options easily. Although this software package lacks some abilities such as Co-kriging, it does provide a convenient tool for geostatistical applications and should also help scientists from other fields.

Finally, we continue to develop our interface to the GeoZui3D 3-dimensional visualization software. GeoZui3D is a highly interactive 3D visualization system to support a number of different research projects. The GeoZui3D software is being developed at the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, University of New Hampshire. It is a Zooming User Interface - hence 'Zui'. It is georeferenced - hence GeoZui. It emphasizes interactive 3D solutions - hence GeoZui3D. Our current efforts are focused on improving and simplifying access to the data stored in the US GLOBEC data system since our experimental data are not regularly spaced nor formatted in a way that GeoZui3D is prepared to handle.