Conceptualizing an Institute for Sustainable Earth and Environmental Software (ISEES)

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

The University of California Santa Barbara is awarded a grant for a one-year community-driven process to develop a strategic plan for the creation and operation of an Institute for Sustainable Earth and Environmental Software (ISEES) that would provide development and sustainable support of innovative and interoperable scientific software tools that can transform science at the intersection of earth, environmental, and life sciences. Software is critical to advances in environmental science, but is in crisis due to issues that are prevalent in scientific software, such as code complexity and opacity, lack of scalability, lack of openness and interoperability, and lack of formal versioning and management of software evolution for sustainability. The vision for ISEES is to advance the state of science software by engaging earth and environmental research communities to address the software barriers that most impede grand challenge earth science. This project will work with community efforts such as EarthCube to develop a strategic plan that improves capabilities for scientific discovery within overlapping disciplines within the geological and biological sciences, such as ecology, oceanography, and atmospheric science. ISEES would engage a large swath of the science community in projects that will create and mature software that facilitates bold new science advances. For each science topic identified as a community priority, participants in this planning effort will collaboratively address the entire software lifecycle, from product conceptualization, to requirements analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, long-term support, and decommissioning. A robust workforce development program will be specified to sustain software advances made through ISEES. The planning process will be diverse, including earth, life, and environmental scientists and experts from software engineering, computer science, informatics, and library sciences. A series of design workshops that use proven, formal planning and assessment methods will meet in three topical clusters to conceptualize and articulate a grand vision and strategy for how ISEES will transform the software lifecycle and galvanize the research community. A Science Cluster collates and articulates grand challenges within earth observational sciences that focus and drive ISEES' software activities and define exemplary collaborative science activities that support detailed requirements analysis. A Software Cluster analyzes requirements for scientific software and proposes approaches for ISEES to address these via improvements across the full science software lifecycle. And, a Sustainability and Adoption Cluster examines sustainability and governance challenges, and proposes models for engaging the research community, governing ISEES, and developing an effective workforce that can sustain the portfolio of science software curated through ISEES. Community experts lead each working group and collectively comprise a Steering Committee that synthesizes recommendations, presents these results and gathers feedback at a Town Hall co-located at a major science conference, and combines this with recommendations from an open call for comments on the Internet to create the final Strategic Plan describing the mission, design, and impact of ISEES.