The Earth System Curator

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The Earth System Curator

• Metadata Infrastructure for Climate Modeling
• Rocky Dunlap
• Georgia Tech

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What is the Earth System Curator?

• The goal of Curator is to link climate datasets
  with a detailed description of the model that ran
  to produce the dataset
• Use cases for climate model metadata
• Provenance (history of what happened)
• Archival and search (for models and datasets)
• Model inter-comparison
• Compatibility checking
• Generation of coupler components

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Collaborators

• Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF)
• Software infrastructure to facilitate building
  numerical Earth System models
• Component-based model development
• Built in tools for managing common modeling tasks
  (coupling fields, calendars, grid creation, etc).
• Earth System Grid (ESG)
• A large scale distributed portal for hosting data
  produced by Earth System models
• Services such as dataset ingest, faceted search,
  dataset browsing, viewing metadata, downloading
  datasets

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Getting Model Metadata into ESG

• ESMF modeling components are self-describing
• Metadata is exported from an ESMF component in
  XML format
• The XML is ingested into ESG and exposed to the
  data portal
• Users discover components and datasets via the
  portal

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Metadata Lifecycle
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Metadata Lifecycle

• ESMF component exports XML metadata
• The XML is validated and harvested into a Java
  object representation
• The Java objects are persisted to a relational
  database (RDBMS)
• Metadata in the RDBMS is then harvested into RDF
  a Semantic Web ontology language
• The RDF is accessed by the ESG web portal for
  faceted search of the metadata

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ESMF XML Output (example)
ltmodel_component name"Finite Volume Dynamical
Core"gt ltdiscipline_setgt ltdiscipline
name"Atmosphere" /gt lt/discipline_setgt
ltphysical_domain_setgt ltphysical_domain
nameEarth system" /gt lt/physical_domain_setgt
ltagency_setgt ltagency name"NASA" /gt
lt/agency_setgt ltinstitution_setgt
ltinstitution name"Global Modeling and
Assimilation Office (GMAO)" /gt
lt/institution_setgt
XML output will be available on next ESMF release
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ESMF XML Output (example)
ltauthor_setgt ltauthor name"Max
Suarez" /gt lt/author_setgt
ltcoding_language_setgt ltcoding_language
name"Fortran 90" /gt lt/coding_language_setgt
ltmodel_component_framework_setgt
ltmodel_component_framework name"ESMF (Earth
System Modeling Framework)" /gt
lt/model_component_framework_setgt
ltvariable_setgt ltvariable
shortname"DPEDT" longname"Edge pressure
tendency" units"Pa s-1" /gt ltvariable
shortname"DUDT" longname"Eastward wind
tendency" units"m s-2" /gt
lt/variable_setgt lt/model_componentgt
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Faceted search
Harvested component
ESG Prototype Data Portal
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ESG Prototype Data Portal
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ESG Prototype Data Portal
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Demo of Dycore Portal
http//dycore.ucar.edu/
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Technical Challenges Along the Way

• Web-based systems often deal with a lot of data
  formats. This requires lots of translations.
• XML ? Java objects ? relational database ? RDF
• Collaborative ontology development is
  challenging. There is a need for both governance
  structures and tools.
• This will continue to affect all areas of
  e-science

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Future Work for Curator

• Continue working with ESG to add more
  sophisticated metadata to the portal
• ESMF components to export more detailed XML
• Collaborate with international partners for
  designing metadata that can be used by a wide
  audience