Abstract

The Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) program is a multi-institutional collaborative effort to advance scientific understanding of environmental interactions from bedrock to the atmospheric boundary layer across scales and disciplines. To create a comprehensive hydrogeochemical portrait of experimental sites the observatories collect large volumes of data. Publishing, analyzing and archiving these data in a consistent and integrated manner across all CZO sites is challenging due to the inherent heterogeneity in data collection and processing techniques. We present the initial design and a prototype of the CZO data sharing infrastructure. While each CZO site maintains its own data management system, the integrated infrastructure design specifies formats and protocols for presenting the information on CZO web sites, where it can be browsed by users as well as automatically harvested into a centralized data system. The latter validates, archives and converts the data into standards-compliant data services, which can be consumed by various client applications.

Keywords— environmental observatory; CZO; cyberinfrastructure; hydrology; information integration

Citation

Zaslavsky, I., T. Whitenack, M. Williams, D. G. Tarboton, K. Schreuders, and A. Aufdenkampe (2011): The Initial Design of Data Sharing Infrastructure for the Critical Zone Observatory. Proceedings of the Environmental Information Management Conference, Santa Barbara, CA, 28-29 September, EIM'2011, pp. 145-150.

This Paper/Book acknowledges NSF CZO grant support.