CyberConnector is designed to extensively adopt open geospatial standards/specifications, including the ISO geospatial data and metadata standards and standard-based geospatial web service, workflows, and sensor web technologies are the foundation. It bridges the sensors and earth science models through standard interfaces, such as Web Processing Service, Sensor Planning Service, and Catalogue Service for the Web. It facilitates the automatic preparation and feeding of both historic and near-real time Earth Observation customized data and on-demand derived products into Earth science models.The standard interfaces allow the automatic handshaking between components with workflow designers and underlying workflow execution language.
This system provides users with an entrance to access the virtual geospatial data products registered in CyberConnector's CSW. The products are not present until someone requests them. Once a request is received, CyberConnector will invoke the product generation processing model on the server side and execute the model by adopting appropriate geoprocessing Web services. When the execution is over, the outputted products will be sent back to the data consumers automatically.
This work is funded by National Science Foundation (ICER 1440294 and AGS1740693).
Earth observation (EO) through sensors is the most important way to collect Earth science data. It is very common that scientists who conduct data-intensive Earth science research need to integrate and analyze multi-source EO datasets, which are typically very diverse in the collecting sensors, data formats, projections, spatial/temporal resolutions and coverage, access methods, quality, documentation, and user support. Studies showed that scientists who used satellite remote sensing data for data-intensive geospatial science applications had to spend over 60% of their time just for data acquisition, preprocessing, and post-processing. The major barriers are 1) difficulty to find and obtain the needed data from geographically distributed data sources, 2) data not in ready-to-analyze form, 3) the unavailability of the needed data products, and 4) lack of or inadequate computing resources to handle the large volumes of data. The goal of CyberConnector is to remove or significantly lower these major barriers and to demonstrate the dramatic reduction of the time and efforts.
CyberConnector aims to achieve objectives:
DDRS is one of the two subcomponents in the framework that connect to the EO sensor and data world. The major functions of DDRS are to discover and obtain data. It uses open standards for interfacing with data sources, allowing a web sensor or an EO data system equipped with standard interfaces to be easily plugged into the framework.
SGMS takes ESM outputs and in many cases the geophysical products generated by PIAS as inputs to analyze against science goals for determining whether additional or refined geophysical products are needed by the model to meet these goals. Use of geophysical products in SGMS rather than sensor measurements hides the complexity of the EO world from science-goal analysis and enables dynamic plug-in and removal of sensors without affecting SGMS.