The Earth observation science community monitors and analyzes the Earth's ecosystem.  It incorporates research in remote sensing, modeling, simulation, and spatio-temporal data management. Earth observation scientists analyze and maintain large data sets from a variety of sensors. This data includes satellite data, ground based data and airborne data, all of which involve spectra containing information on key surface properties such as species composition and physiological state. Although a large number of agreements exist which outline the policies for the sharing of data among this community, the cyberinfrastructure needed to standardize and share this data hasn't been available until recently.

GeoChronos is a platform leveraging web 2.0, social networking, and cloud computing technologies that is aimed at enabling members of the Earth observation science community to share data and scientific applications, and to collaborate more effectively. The platform will facilitate the automated collection and management of data obtained at different spatial and temporal resolutions. GeoChronos will be a major contributor to the development of community driven online spectral libraries.

Collaboration capabilities of the GeoChronos platform will be achieved through the use of a model-driven architecture that allows for new data sources, and new applications to be quickly integrated into the platform by scientists. Integrating tools, data, and computing resources into a single platform will enable the automation of scientific workflows. The platform will provide tools for developing a web accessible spectral library, allowing Earth observation scientists to contribute to, and query a database of spectra. The spectral library will support rich metadata necessary for interpreting observed spectra. The overall goal is for the platform to become a one stop shop for Earth observation science.

The GeoChronos platform is being developed by the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary in collaboration with the Center for Earth Observation Sciences at the University of Alberta. Development of the GeoChronos platform is funded by CANARIE, as part of their Network-Enabled Platforms (NEP) program, and Cybera. Progress of the GeoChronos NEP project can be tracked here.

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Last updated 899 days ago by Cameron Kiddle