Updated April 17, 2016
With all the recent excitement and good hopes over the White House Climate Data Initiative, and the ongoing progress of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), there is another huge data initiative that bears mention: EarthCube.
I have used the word “initiative” for EarthCube but it has also been described as a vision, as a multi-faceted, multi-layered partnership, and also as a “virtual organization.” As such, it bears quite a bit of resemblance to the international GEOSS, but is much more US-based, having been conceived and currently funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). Thus, it may be quite important for advancing President Obama’s Climate Data Initiative and for similar efforts to bring data to bear on real-world problems that need fast, efficient, and long-lasting solutions. This means providing easy and unlimited access to any kind of scientific data–access that allows plotting, modeling, and visualizing in various ways, from a desktop, a phone, a tablet, out in the field or in the research lab, the classroom, or the office of a policy-maker. We anticipate that many NSF-funded EarthCube projects, along with the data shared therein, will be used to meet some of the goals of the GEOSS initiative. There are also natural ties between EarthCube and various Open Data initiatives.
- transform the conduct of data-enabled research and education for the geosciences;
- create effective community-driven cyberinfrastructure;
- allow global data discovery and knowledge management; and
- achieve interoperability and data integration within and across disciplines.”
Graphic courtesy of NSF.
There are literally hundreds of scientists who have had input to the “vision” of EarthCube thus far (including those from Esri) and dozens that are currently being funded. Hundreds are now active in EarthCube as a virtual organization. Esri has been involved in several of the working groups, charrettes, and stakeholder workshops since the beginning of EarthCube, and is now engaging in varying levels of invited participation on four of the projects funded in September 2013:
- The EarthCube test enterprise governance project, EarthCube Test Enterprise Governance: An Agile Approach by Lee Allison et al. (Arizona Geological Survey lead)
- The EarthCube building blocks project, A Broker Framework for Next Generation Geoscience (BCube) by SiriJohda Khalsa et al. (University of Colorado lead)
- The EarthCube building blocks project, Community Inventory of EarthCube Resources for Geosciences Interoperability (CINERGI) by Ilya Zaslavsky et al. (San Diego Supercomputer Center lead)
- The EarthCube conceptual design project, Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences by Ilya Zaslavsky et al. (San Diego Supercomputer Center lead)
Esri will continue to be involved with additional planned collaborations as new rounds of EarthCube proposals for RCNs and Building Blocks are funded. These include work with academic scientists to leverage and enhance our open-source GeoPortal server for supporting multiple ontology searches and for showing relationships beyond just digital data archives (i.e., relationships among people, institutions, models, workflows, etc.). Chief Scientist Dawn Wright is an active member of the Liaison Team within EarthCube Governance.
For information on EarthCube please visit earthcube.org and http://www.nsf.gov/geo/earthcube.
This American Geophysical Union article also provides an excellent overview of the EarthCube vision.