Collaborative Proposal: EarthCube Integration: Accelerating Scientific WorkflowS using EarthCube Technologies (ASSET)

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

A major need in the geosciences is to reduce the amount of time geoscientists spend on "data wrangling" tasks (finding, accessing, subsetting, gridding, processing, reformatting, visualizing) so that they can spend more time on complex scientific analysis. This project will develop a means for scientists to document and interact with all of the data management and analysis tools that they need to create a scientific result, and it will add tools to find common patterns in their work to help find tools that could reduce the time needed to produce the result. This work may also help to make moethods and analyses more transparent by providing the means to track the steps in creating a scientific result. This project builds on relationships among cyberinfrastructure experts and geoscientists examine current scientific workflows and the integration of EarthCube tools. The work will include a workflow sketching interface to specify the steps, dependencies, current tools, current duration, and other important aspects of a scientist's workflow. As part of the proposed pilot project, the team will examine two geoscience use cases (hurricane risk and water resources) in detail and assign cyberinfrastructure experts to integrate EarthCube tools into these science workflows, to demonstrate the increases in productivity that are realized. In addition, the team will conduct a workshop/clinic at a major geoscience conference to collect additional use cases from the community, where geoscientists will describe their workflows and receive personalized advice on the use of EarthCube tools. If successful, the researchers may expand on this pilot project to conduct many more workshops at other venues and to map many more scientific workflows to corresponding EarthCube technologies.