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

水的可持续性是一个巨大的挑战性问题，只能通过研究社区的共同努力来解决，这些社区从许多不同的角度研究水。到目前为止，重大挑战规模的水研究的进展一直受到数据和计算资源之间缺乏互操作性的阻碍，而这又源于整个水科学界软件开发实践缺乏协调和严格性。该项目正式化并扩展了2010年秋季关于NSF环境观测网络（NSF奖#1049273）软件挑战的研讨会发起的规划工作，以开发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）的组建，该研究所通过使用开源原则来解决社区的互操作性问题，以实现创新和可持续的科学软件。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，将开源社区模式应用于这个科学研究社区的社区。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。这些用例提供了网络基础设施需求和目标的来源，以便在制定计划时对其进行评估。规划过程减轻了建立这种新型软件研究所固有的风险，这是展示软件研究所将如何改变水科学的第一步。

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.