Giving Ocean Sciences (Feb 2010) presentation that refers to Xenia
Emilio Mayorga
I've been meaning to let you know that I'm giving a presentation at
the Ocean Sciences 2010 conference in late February
(http://www.agu.org/meetings/os10/), about our experience and
perspective on in-situ data management issues in NANOOS; more
specifically, the components that I've been directly responsible for
or have made substantial contributions on. I will make extensive
reference to our Xenia implementation, and also plan to praise your
efforts at making the Xenia data model accessible to others.
The abstract is listed below, FYI. I'm disappointed I haven't had the
time to contribute back to Xenia from my experience over the last
year, but hopefully preparing for that presentation will help put me
in shape to contribute back a bit.
I guess it's still not too late to say Happy New Year!
Cheers,
-Emilio Mayorga
NANOOS
APL, University of Washington
ID# MT11A-05 Location: PB253
Time of Presentation: Feb 22 9:30 AM - 9:45 AM
Regional to local IOOS Data Management and Interoperability:
Perspective from the Trenches (NANOOS, US Pacific NW)
E. Mayorga1; D. Jones1; R. Blair2
1. Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle, WA,
United States.
2. The Boeing Company, Seattle, WA, United States.
As the IOOS regional association for the US Pacific Northwest, the
Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems (NANOOS)
has a responsibility to implement and foster appropriate data
management approaches with local and regional data providers. These
providers manage in-situ observational assets, and range from county
agencies, private industry and regional partnerships, to the state
agencies and academic groups that are also principal partners in
NANOOS' Data Management and Communication (DMAC) efforts. As with
other IOOS regional associations, NANOOS is responsible for
implementing national data interoperability schemes and serving as
regional data aggregator. In 2009 NANOOS expanded its data management
and aggregation approach for in-situ observation platforms from one
institution (CMOP/Oregon Health & Science University) to two (APL,
University of Washington), in order to better support local needs for
data stewardship and sharing. We will talk about our experience
developing this second resource at APL in the context of regional and
national collaborations and interoperability.
The APL-NANOOS database focuses primarily on datasets from Washington
state, and includes data from near-real-time platforms, long-term
repeated cruise lines, and project-specific or legacy, historical
observations. APL chose the Xenia data model developed by
SECOORA/Carolina-COOPS (South Carolina), implementing it on the open
source PostgreSQL relational database system. While not a rigorously
defined data model, Xenia has been adapted by several IOOS partners
and has become the de-facto "best practise" data model for regional
observation systems. This unofficial but important role has emerged as
a result of the willingness by Xenia's developer and loose community
to share their experience and documentation, the open-source and
operating-system-independent nature of component and related software,
and gaps in availability of similar resources. Compared to
well-documented Xenia implementations, APL-NANOOS has emphasized
observational platforms that are best represented as collections,
including depth profiles from buoy profilers and ship casts, and
stations and casts making up a ship cruise. Therefore, we have
expanded the definition and use of collections. We borrowed and
modified the concept of a Data Series from the CUAHSI HIS Observations
Data Model (ODM); this "observation series catalog" is an
automatically updated table summarizing data holdings and statistics
by platform, sensor, observation type, location and monitoring rate.
It facilitates responsive queries of basic information on data
holdings, enabling fast but accurate responses on OGC Sensor
Observation Service (SOS) GetCapabilities and DescribeSensor requests,
and fast user-interaction response in the NANOOS Visualization System
(NVS). We take advantage of PostgreSQL's geospatial extension
(PostGIS) to automatically create GIS-aware data views for
collections. Here, we will also describe our emerging role supporting
local partners with data management, aggregation and redistribution
services, our backing of larger community efforts for sharing data
management software tools and experience, and planned interoperability
enhancements.
jcothran
Great and happy 2010 also! Thanks for sharing the news and best on
the presentation and please feel free to share on the follow-up.
Sorry for my slooow response, I didn't catch this post until just
today.
Feel free to reference the Amazon Machine Image(AMI) or VMware image
if anyone wants to 'test' our Xenia-based production environment
http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/AmazonWebServices
http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/VMwareHome
Being able to virtualize and package development into more like image/
appliance-based computing better seperating and addressing
applications and storage needs for longer-term system administration,
ease and scaling is where I'd like to go, independent to some degree
of the particular problem domain or technical choices.
Cheers
Jeremy
Emilio Mayorga
I was almost forgetting to reply. I've made a note to myself to
mention your work with AMI/VMware; but as that's not my own emphasis,
I won't spend much time on it. I'll try to remember to post my
presentation on the Xenia Google groups site after the conference.
Cheers,
-Emilio
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Emilio Mayorga
people later thanked me for my gung-ho defense of local/regional
roles, vs. national/global efforts by the big boys.
But more importantly (for this posting), the presentation served as a
motivator to finally create a page on the Xenia web site for our
NANOOS-Xenia implementation:
http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/NANOOSXenia
It's a modest, bare-bones start, but I'm very glad to finally have
something there other than my older (and somewhat outdated ...)
Xenia-SOS pages at
http://code.google.com/p/xenia/wiki/nanoos_xenia_sos
I've posted my presentation powerpoint there.
Jeremy (and others), thanks again for all your help over the last 12
months! As you can see on the presentation, I acknowledged your help
and role very prominently; hopefully I didn't mischaracterize your
Xenia usage too badly!
Cheers,
-Emilio
Jeremy Cothran
Emilio Mayorga
Glad you liked it. My presentation was at 9:30 Mon morning (the first
day), so I wanted to try to keep people awake...
Great to hear about the work Dan is doing, thanks. Look forward to
seeing sqlalchemy in action in our context -- I've read about it, but
never had the chance to use it. I'm using psycopg2; it works fine, but
its long-term future worries me a bit. I also intend to place more
emphasis on QA/QC this year, so I'll be keen to track his experience
with python, R, etc. I'll try to post my own xenia schema (SQL code,
maybe some data dictionaries), views and PostGIS-enabled auto-update
code, and python loaders, eventually ...
-Emilio