FOSS geospatial libraries in scientific workflow environments: experiences and directions
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ORIGINAL PAPER
FOSS geospatial libraries in scientific workflow environments: experiences and directions Graeme McFerren · Terence van Zyl · Anwar Vahed
Received: 9 December 2010 / Accepted: 21 July 2011 / Published online: 27 September 2011 © Società Italiana di Fotogrammetria e Topografia (SIFET) 2011
Abstract In multiple research fields such as astronomy, bio-informatics, chem-informatics, geophysics and eco-informatics, scientists are increasingly turning to e-science and specifically scientific workflows as a way of improving, broadening, hastening and sharing their results. Enhanced collaboration, ad hoc access to tools, data and high-performance processing facilities are some of the gains to be made. Scientific workflows are concerned with, amongst others, supporting the repeatability and provenance of experiments. In context of three sets of research (wildfire research, flood modelling and the linking of disease outbreaks to multi-scale environmental conditions), we describe our efforts to provide geospatial capability for scientific workflow software environments to support researchers in exploring, integrating and visualising earth observation and geographic data in conjunction with other research data. We note that functionalities for data ingest (raster and vector), data transformation (reprojection and simplification), data export and spatial overlay operations commonly are required. We find a relative lack of support for geospatial data, services and these functions within several Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) scientific workflow
G. McFerren (B) · T. van Zyl · A. Vahed ICT4EO Research Group, Meraka Institute, CSIR, Pretoria, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] Present Address: G. McFerren CSIR, Building 43, Brummeria, Pretoria, South Africa
packages. Furthermore, we highlight some software development and data encoding challenges faced when utilising various FOSS geospatial libraries within these scientific workflow environments. Finally, we offer suggestions for improving the integration of geospatial data as well as processing and analysis software tools into such environments. Keywords Geospatially enabled scientific workflows · Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial
Introduction Scientists faced with growing volumes of data, and the need to perform complex calculations on these data in distributed and collaborative environments, have turned to the concept of scientific workflows (Gil et al. 2007). Research indicates that scientists can be shielded from the underlying technologies and some of the processes needed to analyse these data sources through the mechanism of scientific workflows, which automate complex processes and provide integrated access to datasets that are often characterised by their large sizes and distributed locations (Gil et al. 2007; Gibson et al. 2007; Ludascher et al. 2006). Scientific workflows are aimed at formalising and automating the various analytical, transformative and visualisation steps in a data flow while also supporting reproducibility of e
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