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Hyperspectral slicing using AIRS, MODIS and Calypso data in McIDAS-V - Prototype
(courtesy Tom Rink, SSEC) |
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| Web 2.0, Mashups, and the Unidata Community |
Rudolf B. Husar and Erin M. Robinson, Washington University
in St. Louis
The contents of cyberspace are increasingly generated and
distributed by individuals. This is as manifested by the explosive growth
of web-based social
software like wikis, picture-sharing services, and blogs. This
architectural, technological, and cultural transformation of the
Internet, commonly referred to as Web 2.0, is good news for the Unidata community since
it offers new possibilities for sharing and harvesting
community-provided content as well as collaboratively creating new things. In this note we share a few of our early experiences
incorporating the new, participatory Internet into our research
using the May 2007 Georgia Fires as a use case.
The fires in southern Georgia began in
late April 2007 and continued throughout May. Initial event
analysis began with filtering and harvesting
user-contributed web content. The Google Blog Search of " Florida smoke" returned several thousand entries, many of them
unrelated to the wildfires. Visually scanning the blog entries
yielded a number of interesting posts, which were bookmarked and
tagged 070508+Florida+Smoke in the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. Additional smoke photos were found in the photo-sharing service, Flickr. Together, these tools yielded a rich but only qualitative
description of the Georgia Fires.
The tools and methods of quantitative analysis are also
changing. Large monolithic, "do-it-all" software tools are
giving way to web service modules,
combined through
service chaining. Application software can now be created using Service Oriented Architecture, (SOA). Service modules are
published and found through repositories and catalogs. Adherence
to standard interfaces then allows binding (loose coupling) and
dynamic integration of (SOA). The DataFed air quality analysis applications are built using
web services and workflow integration software. For the Georgia
Smoke analysis, this meant easy data access, processing and
viewing of federated smoke-related datasets. Service orientation
not only lowers the entry resistance for service providers, but
it also allows the creation of unanticipated, user-defined
applications or mashups. One of the most impressive mashups is Weather Bonk, an integration of many services including Weather Service Forecasts, webcams, Yahoo Geocoding/Maps/Traffic and Google Maps.
Wikis, originally used to collaboratively write and discuss documents,
are now also used as a general user-defined workspace to organize web
content and as a client for mashups
through incorporation of RSS feeds, Google Maps, structured data
etc. The Georgia Smoke Event wiki page is an example of this functionality, containing structured metadata
which describes the
event in a standard way, links to harvesting queries, data resources viewable in
Google Earth as well as providing an event summary written and discussed collaboratively by the community.
As this short teaser shows, the entry resistance to any
particular Web 2.0 application is rather low. A clear challenge
to the Earth Science community is determining how to
apply these tools in research and education.
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Unidata IDV developers Don Murray and Jeff McWhirter spent several days last month at University of Wisconsin’s Space Science Engineering Center (SSEC) for a first-ever IDV Developer’s Workshop. SSEC is in the process of developing the next generation of McIDAS–dubbed McIDAS-V (or Mc-V for short). They are looking at using the IDV framework and the underlying VisAD library to develop visualization and analysis tools for multi-spectral and hyper-spectral data. In response to an invitation from the McIDAS development group, Don and Jeff developed a course for Java programmers interested in the using the IDV framework to develop customized applications. The two- and a half-day course presented an overview of the framework as well as examples of using it to import new datasets and create new displays. Materials from the course will be used in the upcoming Advanced IDV Training Workshop being included in response to an action item from the Policy Committee.
Eight programmers from SSEC attended the course. One of the them, Tom Rink, whose HYDRA application was recently highlighted in BAMS, found the course extremely useful. As Tom put it:
The hands-on, open-discussion, format of the workshop was
really the ideal way for developers to see the key aspects of
the IDV's architecture; much better than web documents alone,
though they are a necessary resource. The IDV development
framework will provide an excellent platform for the new HYDRA viewer, now under construction, thus bring new capabilities
and data to both HYDRA and the IDV.
In addition, Don and Jeff met with the McIDAS User’s Group (MUG) support staff to get input on any changes needed to the IDV framework to support the Mc-V development. They also took the opportunity to meet with Bill Hibbard and other VisAD developers to discuss solutions to some performance issues in VisAD and the IDV.
These meetings and the ideas generated have already led to new features and performance improvements that benefit all IDV users. Thanks to SSEC for providing this opportunity! |
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 Ah Paris! City of Light. City of Culture. City of Romance. City of netCDF.
What's that? NetCDF? Hmmmm... how did that last one slip into the list? For Unidata SOARS student Shanna-Shaye Forbes it seems quite natural. With
SOARS's blessing and support, Shanna traveled to Paris to attend the GO-ESSP Sixth Annual Workshop. The agenda filled two and a half full days
with sessions  beginning at eight or nine o'clock in the morning and
stretching through until 5:15. Lunch and dinner breaks provided
opportunities for informal discussion.
Shanna walked away from the workshop with a couple of important
takeaways. The first was an enhanced understanding of the relevance and
importance of her project, the netCDF-4 C++ API. She picked up a lot of
information from presentations and discussions on how standards are being
developed and the necessity for collaboration in their development that
filled out knowledge gained in the classroom.
The extremely knowledgeable and agile SOARS staff, Anneliese Calhoun and Rebecca Haacker-Santos, really made the trip come together in a very compressed timeframe: two days. That's impressive.
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A call for nominations to Unidata's Governing Committees will be in e-mail within a very few days. Members are appointed for three-year terms, and in general, meetings are held twice each year. Here are links to the Policy Committee and the Users Committee that will provide you with additional information on how each one contributes to the Unidata enterprise. If someone you know would be a good addition to either committee, nominate them by sending e-mail to nominations@unidata.ucar.edu.
NOTE: Here is a glossary containing expansions of acronyms used in this month's e-letter articles. We strive to keep overall list as current as possible, and we welcome your suggested inclusions on additional terms and their definitions.
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