EAGER: Launch of a Water Science Software Institute (WSSI)

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

Water sustainability is a grand challenge problem that can only be addressed as a collaborative effort of a community of research communities who study water from many different perspectives. To date, progress on grand challenge-scale water research has been hindered by a lack of interoperability among data and computing resources that in-turn stems from a lack of coordination and rigor in software development practices across the water science community. This project formalizes and expands planning efforts initiated by a fall 2010 workshop on software challenges of the NSF's Environmental Observatory Networks (NSF Award #1049273) to develop a Scientific Software Innovation Institute (S2I2) centered on water science and environmental observation. The plan will guide formation of a Water Science Software Institute (WSSI) that addresses the community's interoperability problem by using Open Source principles to enable innovative and sustainable scientific software. The project involves two main activities: 1) determining the scope and the cyberinfrastructure requirements of the water science the WSSI addresses, and 2) developing a plan to apply the Open Source community model to this community of scientific research communities. To guide planning activities, two driving use cases are investigated: evaluating watershed best management practices, and understanding nitrogen dynamics and the impact of ecological patch structure. The use cases provide a source of cyberinfrastructure requirements and targets against which to evaluate the plan as it develops. The planning process mitigates the risks inherent in standing up this new kind of software institute, and it is a first step toward demonstrating how a software institute will transform water science.