Abstract

U.S. GLOBEC Data Management System Overview for Georges Bank Robert C. Groman

The U.S. GLOBEC Georges Bank Program uses the U.S. Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS) data management system to support our data management needs. We require physical and biological data and information to be made available to our distributed scientific investigators in a timely basis. These investigators are located in 24 different institutions, throughout Canada and the United States. The JGOFS Data Management System uses standard World Wide Web (WWW) clients (e.g., Netscape, Mosaic, etc.) and the hypertext transmission protocol (http) to serve data and information to all types of computing platforms. The JGOFS system uses a data object paradigm to allow numeric, image, video and text-based data to be transmitted over the Internet. A standard set of plotting tools is available for basic x-y and map plots. Also, the system will reformat and download the numeric data into "flat files" for subsequent analysis by other tools such as Matlab. Currently, in addition to information about the Program, the system is serving the following types of data: along track (sea surface sensors); modeling results; drifter images and movies; digital values and 3-D perspective curtain plot of acoustic volume back scattering; and images of analyzed results.

The JGOFS software is freely available over the Internet via our home page (URL: http://globec.whoi.edu/) and has been ported to HP, IBM, IRIX, OSF, Solaris and SunOS Unix-based systems. We are working to port the software to PC/Windows and the Macintosh platforms

The system is flexible, data driven, extensible and network accessible. It is used by both the JGOFS and U.S. GLOBEC Georges Bank programs to provide access to the data generated by each of their programs. Each program is able to implement its own data policies using the same JGOFS software. A detailed description of the JGOFS software (JGOFS Data System Overview, Flierl, et. al.) is available on-line at http://lake.mit.edu/datasys/jgsys.html.