Geospatial-enabled Data Exploration and Computation through Data Infrastructure Building Blocks

Abstract:

Geospatial data are present everywhere today with the proliferation of location-aware computing devices and sensors. This is especially true in the scientific community where large amounts of data are driving research and education activities in many domains. Collaboration over geospatial data, for example, in modeling, data analysis and visualization, must still overcome the barriers of specialized software and expertise among other challenges. The GABBs project aims at enabling broader access to geospatial data exploration and computation by developing spatial data infrastructure building blocks that leverage capabilities of end-to-end application service and virtualized computing framework in HUBzero. Funded by NSF Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBS) initiative, GABBs provides a geospatial data architecture that integrates spatial data management, mapping and visualization and will make it available as open source. The outcome of the project will enable users to rapidly create tools and share geospatial data and tools on the web for interactive exploration of data without requiring significant software development skills, GIS expertise or IT administrative privileges. This presentation will describe the development of geospatial data infrastructure building blocks and the scientific use cases that help drive the software development, as well as seek feedback from the user communities.