CDI-Type I: CiiWork: an interactive workbench for integration, exploration, and analysis of chronological information

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Chronological datasets that span large periods of time are the focusof study in several diverse disciplines: climatology, geology,biology, history, and anthropology, to name just a few. While thesedatasets share strong links to time scales, they exhibit a greatdiversity in most other aspects. For example, some datasets arederived from ice cores, while others arise from archaeologicalartifacts, instrumental records, and numerical modeling. In eachdiscipline, researchers have spent considerable effort to carefullydeveloping a time scale for each such dataset, and to interpreting theresulting temporal data, in turn leading to scientific insights. Suchchronological datasets are growing rapidly in both size and diversity,due to not only increasing activity by scientists worldwide but alsoimproving technology. The integration and analysis of this large anddiverse collection of datasets promises to yield significantscientific breakthroughs. However, such integration and analysiscurrently requires a very significant human effort, which severelyrestricts our ability to realize its potential value. Most of theanalysis techniques developed in the past do not scale up to the sizeand diversity of data we must now analyze. The goal of this project isto break this barrier to scientific breakthroughs by developingmethods to solve the problems arising from the diversity and volume ofdata, and to implement, test, and apply these methods in aninteractive workbench.Developing the above workbench requires work in multiplecyberinfrastructure research topics, which by themselves have receivedconsiderable research attention. By their nature, however, thesetopics do not admit many universal solutions and there is currently alarge gap separating the generalized results available in theinformatics literature and their realization in operational systemsthat are ready for use by domain scientists. Our effort will focus onbridging this gap by adapting and specializing known methods, anddeveloping new ones when needed, to the characteristics of thechronological data of interest. This work is not limited to the taskof implementing cyberinfrastructure for the described domains based onknown methods. Rather, the work requires research effort to mapconcepts and techniques from computer science to various scientificdomains, and vice versa, carefully adapting prior results anddeveloping new ones. This work requires not only expertise on both thecyberinfrastructure and domain sciences sides of the gap, but also aclose- knit collaboration that can overcome traditional inter-domainbarriers.By enabling effective use of the large and diverse collection ofchronological data, our workbench opens the door to scientificbreakthroughs in multiple disciplines. As just one specific example,our workbench will improve our understanding of one of the mostimportant scientific and societal problems: the operation of theglobal climate system, past, present, and future. In addition toenhancing the effectiveness of the scientists specializing in eachdiscipline, our work will allow researchers from other disciplines,and people with a more casual interest, to easily access and,importantly, process and interpret the same data from which keyresearch results and forecasts emerge. This aspect is particularlyimportant as it demystifies the related research that may otherwiseappear arbitrary or opinionated. Shared examples will be traceable byothers all the way back to raw data. Our results will be disseminatednot only through the traditional professional channels but alsothrough outreach to the broader community.