Collaborative Research: SI2-SSI: The Community-Driven BiG CZ Software System for Integration and Analysis of Bio- and Geoscience Data in the Critical Zone

临界区(CZ)科学界负责整合来自众多学科的理论、模型和数据，这些学科共同研究地球表面的过程。临界区是地球的可渗透近表面层--从植被冠层的大气到活跃循环的地下水的下界。临界区是国家研究委员会在《地球科学中的基础研究机遇》(2001年)报告中创造的一个术语，目的是强调对地球上的S表面的地球带进行彻底的多学科研究的新方法的必要性，这对维持地球上的陆地生命至关重要。2013年1月，CZ社区的103名成员参加了CZ-EarthCube领域研讨会(国家科学基金会奖#1252238)，以确定CZ社区的关键科学驱动因素、关键的计算和信息技术(“网络”)挑战和关键的网络需求的优先顺序。他们确认，临界区科学界的中心科学挑战是通过理论-模型-数据融合的方法发展出临界区的“大统一理论”。工作参与者一致表示，这种方法缺少的关键需求是未来的网络基础设施，用于无缝地进行4D可视化探索，整合与关键地带结构和功能相关的所有生物和地球科学学科的知识(数据、模型输出和内插)，类似于今天的S使用谷歌地球轻松探索历史卫星图像和地球表面照片的能力。这个项目朝着满足这一需求迈出了第一大步。这个项目的总体目标是与CZ科学和更广泛的社区，包括自然资源管理者和利益相关者，共同开发一个基于Web的集成和可视化环境，用于联合分析临界区(BIG CZ)的跨尺度生物和地球科学过程，跨越实验和观测设计。我们的项目目标是：(1)动员CZ和更广泛的社区共同开发和部署大型CZ软件堆栈；(2)开发大型CZ门户Web应用程序，以供科学家、资源经理、教育工作者和公众直观、高性能地发现、可视化、访问和发布数据；(3)开发大型CZ工具箱，使精通网络的CZ科学家能够访问大型CZ应用编程接口(API)；以及(4)开发大型CZ中央软件堆栈，将为多个关键区域域开发的数据系统连接到单个元数据目录中。整个大型CZ软件系统将作为完全开源软件项目的模块化套件在公共存储库上开发。它将围绕一个新的观测数据模型2.0版(ODM2)建立，该版本由大型CZ项目团队的成员开发，社区投入，在单独的资助下(美国国家科学基金会奖#1224638)。

The Critical Zone (CZ) science community takes as its charge the effort to integrate theory, models and data from the multitude of disciplines collectively studying processes on the Earth's surface. The Critical Zone is Earth's permeable near-surface layer - from the atmosphere at the vegetation's canopy to the lower boundary of actively circulating groundwaters. The Critical Zone was a term coined by the National Research Council's Basic Research Opportunities in the Earth Sciences (BROES) Report (2001) to highlight the imperative for a new approach to thoroughly multi-disciplinary research on the zone of the Earth?s surface that is critical to sustaining terrestrial life on our planet. In January 2013, 103 members of the CZ community met for the CZ-EarthCube Domain Workshop (NSF Award #1252238) to prioritize the CZ community's key science drivers, key computational and information technology ("cyber") challenges and key cyber needs. They identified that the central scientific challenge of the critical zone science community is to develop a "grand unifying theory" of the critical zone through a theory-model-data fusion approach. Work participants unanimously described that the key missing need of this approach was a future cyberinfrastructure for seamless 4D visual exploration of the integrated knowledge (data, model outputs and interpolations) from all the bio and geoscience disciplines relevant to critical zone structure and function, similar to today?s ability to easily explore historical satellite imagery and photographs of the earth's surface using Google Earth. This project takes the first "BiG" steps toward answering that need.The overall goal of this project is to co-develop with the CZ science and broader community, including natural resource managers and stakeholders, a web-based integration and visualization environment for joint analysis of cross-scale bio and geoscience processes in the critical zone (BiG CZ), spanning experimental and observational designs. Our Project Objectives are to: (1) Engage the CZ and broader community to co-develop and deploy the BiG CZ software stack; (2) Develop the BiG CZ Portal web application for intuitive, high-performance map-based discovery, visualization, access and publication of data by scientists, resource managers, educators and the general public; (3) Develop the BiG CZ Toolbox to enable cyber-savvy CZ scientists to access BiG CZ Application Programming Interfaces (APIs); and (4) Develop the BiG CZ Central software stack to bridge data systems developed for multiple critical zone domains into a single metadata catalog. The entire BiG CZ Software system will be developed on public repositories as a modular suite of fully open source software projects. It will be built around a new Observations Data Model Version 2.0 (ODM2) that is being developed by members of the BiG CZ project team, with community input, under separate funding (NSF Award #1224638).