Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Science Rendezvous > Posters
The presenter is listed in italics. All poster presentations are the property of their respective authors. Please contact the authors for permission to use images, information, or ideas.

Forcing interoperability: An intentionally fractured approach

Mary Jo Brodzik(1), David Gallaher (2), Ted Scambos (3), Julienne Stroeve (4).

NSIDC (1), CIRES (2), CU (3), NASA (4)

The NSIDC is attempting to rebuild a significant portion of its public-facing cyberinfrastructure to better meet the needs expressed by the cryospheric community. The project initially addresses a specific science need – understanding Greenland’s contribution to global sea level rise through comparison and analysis of variables such as temperature, albedo, melt, ice velocity and surface elevation. This project will ultimately be expanded to cover most of NSIDC’s cryospheric data. Like many organizations, we need to provide users with data discovery interfaces, collaboration tools and mapping services. Complicating this effort is the need to reduce the volume of raw data delivered to the user. Data growth, especially with time-series data, will overwhelm our software, processors and network like never before. We need to provide the users the ability to perform first level analysis directly on our site. In order to accomplish this, the users should be free to modify the behavior of these tools as well as incorporate their own tools and analysis to meet their needs. Rather than building one monolithic project to build this system, we have chosen to build three semi-independent systems. One team is building a data discovery and web based distribution system, the second is building an advanced analysis and workflow system and the third is building a customized web mapping service. These systems will use the same underlying data structures and services but will employ different technologies and teams to build their objectives, schedules and user interfaces. Obviously, we are adding complexity and risk to the overall project however this may be the best method to achieve interoperability because the development teams will be required to build off each others work. The teams will be forced to design with other users in mind as opposed to building interoperability as an afterthought, which a tendency in monolithic systems. All three teams will take advantage of preexisting software and standards whenever possible. We present this topic to stimulate discussion within the development, operational and research communities on how best to proceed.