Enabling End-to-End Geospatial Data Modeling Workflows via INPort: The Isotope Networks Portal

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

Purdue University is awarded a grant to develop and deploy INPort, an extensible, web-based platform for the analysis and modeling of stable isotope data with respect to space and time. INPort will provide a transparent interface between data consumers and data sources by providing integrated data querying, data acquisition, and geospatial modeling operations. It will consist of web-GIS interface linked to a data and application management system that will conduct data identification, acquisition, and processing and model execution behind the scenes. The primary output of INPort will spatially and temporally explicit maps of environmental isotope distributions. INPort software and products will serve a growing number of research programs that generate or use spatiotemporally-resolved environmental isotope data to address key problems in biogeochemistry, organismal ecology, and hydrology, including national-scale monitoring initiatives in these areas. These programs promise to generate large quantities of spatially resolved isotope data from a range of environmental systems, and successful and appropriate integration of this data with existing data sets and ancillary spatial data will be key to maximizing its scientific impact. INPort will facilitate the transformation of these diverse, heterogeneous data into derived products having a uniform, intelligible data type, facilitating learning and data access by a wide range of scientists and non-scientists.