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KAREN wiki
KIWI ADVANCED RESEARCH AND EDUCATION NETWORK
GNS Science
From KAREN wiki
Contents |
Contacts
Phone
- +64 4 570-1444
KAREN champion
Dr Paul Grimwood
- Senior Analyst Programmer
- Email: p.grimwood@gns.cri.nz
Number of projects using KAREN
- 5
KAREN Projects
Institutional Capability Build Project
Achievement to date
- Appointed a KAREN Champion.
- Started work on developing video conferencing at GNS – have opened firewall to allow external "calls" and have contacted Landcare Research and NIWA and offered help to do the same with their systems.
What’s Coming Up
- Video Conferencing. Develop automatic installation package for evo (desktop collaboration system) to allow easy install on staff PCs. Develop a standard webcam package (camera, headset) for staff to purchase (will also keep stock available). Continue to work with other organisations to try and develop video conferencing links (esp Landcare and NIWA)
- Internal Dissemination. Preparation for eResearch seminar
OneGeology
OneGeology (http://www.onegeology.org) is an international initiative of the geological surveys of the world and a flagship project of the ‘International Year of Planet Earth’. It's aim is to create a dynamic geological map of the world available via the web and capable of serving geological information to anyone with internet access. The accessibility of digital geological map data for most parts of the world at similar scales and themes will assist multinational and world-scale projects and concerns. For instance, global warming and climate change are expected to result in increased natural hazards such as rising sea levels and greater flooding and tsunami risk. Greater global knowledge of geological influences will assist with mitigation and disaster relief programs. Dwindling resources of groundwater, minerals and petroleum are resulting in new management and exploration strategies being developed for government and industry who need ready access to international geological information.
GNS Science is a participating member providing geological data from New Zealand to the OneGeology project. At this stage the data is a slightly modified digital GIS version of the 1972 1:1 million scale Geological Map of New Zealand. When the new 1:250,000 QMAP geological map series is completed in 2010 a new 1:1 million map generalised from this series will be used instead.
The concept is a completely modern paradigm. It is planned as a distributed model – a dynamic set of geological map data served mostly on a national basis by individual geological surveys and other organisations to a web portal. The map data can therefore be updated and improved by the providers. Data ownership, intellectual property, data quality, presentation and versioning remain in the control of the contributing organisations.
Phase 1 of the project involves participating organisations providing data as a WMS (Web Map Service) – essentially each organisation's system responds to a request for data by generating an image of data for the area being requested and returns it to the portal for display. The OneGeology portal (http://portal.onegeology.org) is now operational as a pilot and is serving New Zealand and other national geological map data. In Phase 2 of the project organisations will switch to providing a WFS (Web Feature Service). A WFS responds to a data request by returning the actual data (in an XML encoding) for the portal to interpret and display.
The data GNS Science are providing are stored in our data centre at Avalon, Lower Hutt, which is connected to the high speed KAREN network. The OneGeology portal is hosted by BRGM in France, which is connected to the French NREN (National Research and Education Network) and via international interconnections to KAREN. This high-speed international connectivity provided by KAREN and other research networks is what is allowing a project with such a distributed nature to succeed. Without it the user experience would be poor – the map would take too long to draw on the screen.
Contact: Mark Rattenbury, GNS Science. Phone 04 570 4697, Email m.rattenbury@gns.cri.nz
Seismographic Information Service
The Seismographic Information Service, SIS project is a collaborative project between GeoNet and Victoria University of Wellington, VUW, that will provide researchers and educators around the world with more ready access to New Zealand's seismographic data (both the earthquake catalog and raw time series data) using the high speed KAREN network; thereby improving both teaching and research in the geosciences and across a range of disciplines.
There are three important high-level aspects to this project:
1. The high speed KAREN network provides fast access to a large volumes of data, thereby removing the need for data users to maintain local database copies and all the associated problems of maintaining a database copy.
2. Data are mapped to commonly accepted standard schemas (QuakeML and KML) so one can leverage tools to visualise or process these data.
3. Web service access to these data means one can easily access these data and readily integrate these data into automatic processes.
The new Web services provide access to both the raw seismographic data in miniseed format, and to earthquake metadata in the quake catalog. They provide an alternative access mechanism to existing systems. Before the provision of web services, requests for seismographic data were handled by an email-based system, AutoDRM, that does not integrate well into modern cyber-infrastructure, and is often criticized for being somewhat unfriendly to use. Requests for earthquake metadata from the catalog were similarly manually oriented, and data were returned in formats that don't suit automated processing or a rich interactive visual experience.
Currently, around 3.5 GB per day of continuous high-quality seismographic data are collected and archived. This volume will only increase as the seismic network is expanded. The earthquake catalog dating back to 1810, currently holds infomation about 400,000 located events and is growing at roughly 15,000 events per year.
The seismographic data web services will be integrated into the VUW Grid in order to allow processing of large volumes of continuous time-series data for research. A teaching module to educate students in earthquake location principles, based around Google Earth and EQLocate as consumers of the new services, has also been also created.
Web Service Demo
Sample 3 month seismicity can be viewed in Google Earth. From within Google Earth you can then call a QuakeML service to get all data for an event in QuakeML, call a further service to plot stations that recorded the event, and download SEED seismographic data for that event.
The one-year funded project started in June 2008
- Contact: Paul Grimwood - p.grimwood@gns.cri.nz
SCENZ-Grid
SCENZ-Grid is a collaboration between Landcare Research and GNS Science building geospatial infrastructure on KAREN. Landcare Research (LCR) and GNS Science (GNS) hold a significant proportion of NZ's Environmental and Geological data - 15 of the 25 MoRST-designated National Significant Databases. Most of these data are either explicitly spatially referenced or referenced to a concept that has spatial expression. This project will establish project nodes on the KAREN network with best-practice software for managing and analyzing such data.
See article by Robert Gibb.
A demo is available on BeSTGRID
FRED
FRED integration with the GEON Paleo Integration Project (PIP).
TODO
eResearch at GNS Science
eResearch at GNS Science is typified by recent GeoNet development. Provision of Web Services to serve GeoNet earthquake data in a standard output format allows our multiple stakeholders to use our data. The services provide access to data in ways that allows our stakeholders to leverage tools that can talk to these services and/or understand these standard formats. These tools would not understand our native database schema, an excel spreadsheet csv file, or a web page of results, or in some case could not communicate with non-standard interfaces. Furthermore these services could fit into an automatic process. They don't require a human to interact with a form on a web page, although a web application could be just one of the clients of these services. Mapping data to a standard schema is a general principal of semantics that in theory can be applied to all datasets, not just earthquake data. Similarly serving data in a standard way can be applied to any geospatial dataset.
1. Earthquake data web service serving QuakeML facilitates collaborative research at GNS.
Seismologists analysing aftershock sequences need access to data in the earthquake catalog in a particular format because the code that is already available for analysing earthquake catalogs understands data in that format. The emerging standard in the earthquake arena is QuakeML. If the data were not served in that format they would have to either convert it themselves or rewrite the code that processes the catalog.
2. Earthquake data web service serving QuakeML aids seismologists within GNS.
Seismologists need access to the complete earthquake catalog. The old mechanism was to request a GeoNet data manager to run a script to produce the desired output. This manual process relied on key personnel. What if they were on vacation or off sick? A web service to provide these data does not go on holiday or get sick. Although in this particular case, QuakeML was not the desired final format, by serving the complete dataset mapped to a standard schema, seismologists were easily able to use the tools that support that standard to extract the data they needed and reformat it automatically.
3. Supporting Google Earth for education.
Teaching earthquake location to students at VUW used to rely on physical printed traces and rulers. What was missing were simple access mechanisms that students could readily use to get hold of earthquake data at GeoNet and tools to use those data for earthquake location. By providing KML web service access to the earthquake catalog VUW was able to leverage Google Earth as an interface to the catalog and use it to grab GeoNet data. The tool EQLocate was then used for analsys of those data. The Google Earth interface is shown below. Users can view an animation of the earthquakes over the selected time period, obtain all information for each event in QuakeML, plot stations that felt the earthquake, and download seismographs as a single SEED file for each event. Google Earth is a useful tool for viewing spatial datasets. Its free to use and there are no development costs. A simple KML web service to the dataset is all that is required.
4. Supporting Google Earth for analysis of time dependent data within GNS.
The timebar of Google Earth can facilitate analysis of time dependent data sets. The example below shows a time window snippet of a 4 year dataset of around 10,000 earthquakes around the Bay of Plenty region. A swarm can be seen in pink in the vicinity of White Island. On an animation of this dataset, the change in depth of these swarm events over the 4 year period can, in theory at least, be easily visualised. What precludes it in reality is simply the coarse binning of data by depth, but that is easily remedied. The principal though is that Google Earth is a useful tool for analysing temporal chnages and the KML web service allows the use of that tool.
5. Earthquake data Web Feature Server for government.
MOH use a GIS tool called Emergeo to manage events/disasters. They want GeoNet earthquake data (isoseismal lines and near real-time shaking data) to appear as layers in their software application. Most regional councils use ESRI GIS software. Others use MapInfo. The four councils engaged in discussion have all expressed a need to readily view earthquake information (isoseismals and basic quake info) in their particular GIS package. How then to serve these data in a single manner that can be read by all these user groups and others using different software? The answer lies in open geospatial standards. In particular in provision of Web Feature Server output of these data. See the OGC website for further details.
