The Geo Data Portal: A spatial data infrastructure for integration of geographic and atmospheric

This presentation is about the U.S. Geological Survey Geo Data Portal (GDP) project which formalizes common data acquisition and assimilation tasks to assist in model parameterization, model coupling, and data integration in a standards based data retrieval and analysis application. The GDP spatial data infrastructure has been designed to leverage and integrate open-standards and open source software implementations from the geographic, oceanographic, hydrologic, and atmospheric science communities. Interoperability is achieved by adopting existing standards and open-source software components where possible, by working closely with enterprise-scale data providers to implement standards compliant services, and by developing transformations and interoperable connections where necessary.  The GDP spatial data infrastructure allows easy discovery of and access to data from distributed open standards compliant web servers regardless of data scale or volume. GDP Web Processing Services, written relying on numerous open-source software libraries, can dynamically sub-set, reformat, or summarize accessed data. The set of geographic, atmospheric, and general opensource software community standards support simple, rapid development of lightweight user interfaces to commonly needed environmental data access and manipulation tools. Standalone, open source service components of the GDP infrastructure provide the metadata cataloging, data subset access, and spatial-statistics calculation needed to support interdisciplinary environmental modeling.  Ultimately, the services developed for and adopted by the GDP project simplify and streamline the time consuming and resource intensive tasks that are often barriers to inter-disciplinary scientific collaboration.