ACM TechNews

There's a Hole in My Bucket--and in the Data as Well!

UCSD News (05/05/08) Zverina, Jan

University of California, San Diego researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) are working with four other universities on the Hydrologic Information System (HIS), an initiative to create a universally accepted cyberinfrastructure for studying the nation's water resources. HIS, backed by a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, is being developed with the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, a joint effort involving more than 100 universities funded by NSF to advance research in hydrology. SDSC Spatial Information Systems Laboratory director Ilya Zaslavsky, a key architect of HIS, says there is a flood of data on water quality and quantity that is collected every day from thousands of sensor stations through a variety of government agencies. However, he says that despite the wealth of data, most of the databases are incompatible with each other. HIS is currently in the first phases of creating a Web-based cyberinfrastructure that will provide broad and uniform access to comprehensive distributed collections of water data from federal, state, and local repositories, and enable users to publish new observation datasets. HIS will also enable better cross-scale analysis of hydrologic cycles and processes on either a regional or continental scale by combining a variety of climate models and integrating data from neighboring disciplines.

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/supercomputer/05-08HoleInMyBucket.asp#

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