EAGER: Launch of a Water Science Software Institute (WSSI)

水的可持续性是一个巨大的挑战问题，只能通过从许多不同角度研究水的研究团体的合作努力来解决。迄今为止，由于数据和计算资源之间缺乏互操作性，阻碍了大挑战尺度水研究的进展，而这反过来又源于整个水科学界在软件开发实践中缺乏协调和严格性。该项目正式确定并扩展了由2010年秋季NSF环境观测网络软件挑战研讨会（NSF奖#1049273）发起的计划工作，以发展一个以水科学和环境观测为中心的科学软件创新研究所（S2I2）。该计划将指导水科学软件研究所（WSSI）的形成，该研究所通过使用开源原则来解决社区的互操作性问题，从而实现创新和可持续的科学软件。该项目包括两个主要活动：1)确定WSSI所涉及的水科学的范围和网络基础设施要求，2)制定一个计划，将开源社区模型应用于这个科学研究社区。为了指导规划活动，研究了两个驱动用例：评估流域最佳管理实践，了解氮动态和生态斑块结构的影响。用例提供了网络基础设施需求和目标的来源，以便在计划开发时对其进行评估。计划过程减轻了建立这种新型软件研究所所固有的风险，并且它是演示软件研究所将如何转变水科学的第一步。

Water sustainability is a grand challenge problem that can only be addressed as a collaborative effort of a community of research communities who study water from many different perspectives. To date, progress on grand challenge-scale water research has been hindered by a lack of interoperability among data and computing resources that in-turn stems from a lack of coordination and rigor in software development practices across the water science community. This project formalizes and expands planning efforts initiated by a fall 2010 workshop on software challenges of the NSF's Environmental Observatory Networks (NSF Award #1049273) to develop a Scientific Software Innovation Institute (S2I2) centered on water science and environmental observation. The plan will guide formation of a Water Science Software Institute (WSSI) that addresses the community's interoperability problem by using Open Source principles to enable innovative and sustainable scientific software.The project involves two main activities: 1) determining the scope and the cyberinfrastructure requirements of the water science the WSSI addresses, and 2) developing a plan to apply the Open Source community model to this community of scientific research communities. To guide planning activities, two driving use cases are investigated: evaluating watershed best management practices, and understanding nitrogen dynamics and the impact of ecological patch structure. The use cases provide a source of cyberinfrastructure requirements and targets against which to evaluate the plan as it develops. The planning process mitigates the risks inherent in standing up this new kind of software institute, and it is a first step toward demonstrating how a software institute will transform water science.