Overview
1. What is UWEDS - UW Environment DataStream?
UWEDS is a combination of a suite of software and network relay computers that simplify all aspects of scientific data networking, allowing simple access to remote data. Data on your local machine can be made accessible to remote locations regardless of your storage format by using SOURCE SERVICES, and data on remote machines become available to you in the format required by the analysis package you choose by using SINK SERVICES. This extremely powerful, yet simple, realization of the client/server relationship between members of an interdisciplinary project is designed to break down technical barriers to sharing and collaboration.
The UWEDS philosophy:
- Data are often most appropriately distributed by the individual or group that has developed them; and
- The user will in general like to access data in the format acceptable to the application software with which he or she is most familiar.
UWEDS is modelled after the following information and communication technology projects:
Unidata IDD: Internet Data Distribution
University Consortium (150) - NSF - NASA - NOAA
http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/idd/index.html
DODS: Distributed Ocean Data System
NSF - NOAA
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/dods/index.html
THREDDS: Thematic Real-time earth Data Distributed Servers
NSF - NAS
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/projects/THREDDS/
MEDIA: Microgravity Experiment Data and Information Archive
NASA - ESA
http://mgravity.itsc.uah.edu/ideasearch.html
2. What will UWEDS do for me?
UWEDS will allow you internet access to the continuous DataStream of information which integrates all shared observation and modeling activities;
- without worrying about data storage formats,
- while accessing only the data of interest to you,
- using familiar data analysis and visualization packages like:
- Matlab
- Ferret
- IDL
- Excel
- ArcGIS
- Others
UWEDS allows you to make your data available to others:
- Without needing to save the data in numerous storage formats, and
- Without needing to reply to numerous data requests.
3. How does UWEDS improve collaboration and interdisciplinary research and education?
Frequently, efforts at collaboration between groups of researchers are frustrated by technical issues due to:
- Network communication problems (UWEDS uses existing protocols (HTML, XML, ESML) over the Internet)
- Different groups use different analysis packages (UWEDS seamlessly gives users data formatted for their choice of software by identifying the underlying data structure and transforming the data format when the data arrives at the users' desktop).
- Learning new software wastes effort (UWEDS enables an application to "read" new data formats and thereby extending a well understood software application to new types of data).
- Centralized data repositories cannot support works in progress (UWEDS enables all users direct access to the most current version of all data in the DataStream. If a researcher cares to make data available, every UWEDS use knows of its availability instantly).
- It takes to long to rewrite an existing (in-house) application to accept new data structures (UWEDS allow users to configure data to match existing code).
4. What are UWEDS's underlying principles? (Adopted from Unidata, Fulker 1994)
UWEDS is a means by which collaborators can keep current their data holdings and/or visualizations of environmental data. This includes highly dynamic real-time data, near-real-time data, static data, as well as archive and ever improving reconstruction of historic data. UWEDS is a "distributed" system with interacting components (data sources, data relays, and data sinks) at many locations with in the region. Responsibilities for running and maintaining UWEDS are also distributed on the assumption that proper balance among cost, performance, and flexibility are best achieved through a community effort - coordinated by the a core IT (information technology) team - rather then centralized to a small group of technicians.
5. Is there a UWEDS "language"?
No - well sort of "yes". UWEDS is not a single software package. UWEDS is a suite of applications, translators, and protocols which together form a software framework. The basis for this framework is the extension of HTML - HyperText Markup Language. The two useful extension of this "language" is XML (extended markup language http://www.xml.org/ ) and ESML (Earth Science Markup Language http://esml.itsc.uah.edu/ ). These "languages" do nothing more then enable data sources to describe and define their data, and the for data sinks to understand the incoming data. The programming code of the models or analysis software is completely independent of UWEDS and transparent to the user. XML and ESML are standards which describe data and therefore not computer languages, but rather "data" languages. When a "data language standard" is used one very import objective about data sharing is assured:
"Define it once, use it anywhere"
6. How will UWEDS help integrate distributed models?
As an "information network environment" UWEDS "services" open channels of communication between computers and move requested packets of data, information, code, or commands. This is accomplished primarily with XML-RPC protocol, which is a specification and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the internet. Remote procedure calling services use HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding "language". XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted processed and returned.
XML-PRC implementations have already been defined for over 40 client applications (such as: ASP, C/C++, COM, JAVA, KDE, Perl, PHP, Python, Zope).
7. If I just want access to someone's data will UWEDS be easier then looking to their web-site or giving them a call?
No. UWEDS is a collaborative tool; therefore all of the partners have continuous access to available information, and continuous opportunity to share information. All participants are informed at the same time about new available data, changes to existing data, publications, drafts, proposals, meeting, etc. While all types of information may be shared, UWEDS will allow a user to filtering the continually growing pool of information to just the themes of interest, to query a catalog of , to check the status for updates, to select retrieval options ( data "pushed" when available, notify when available, etc.) Here is one simple "default" interface that a UWEDS participant might have on their desktop.
** An example of a simple Default Sink interface: a list of data packets and how current they are, a notice of "sources" that may be out of service, options for how you might filter all the elements in the DataStream to list only those "themes" of interest, and the of course the download which reads the data (in the format identified by your client) if you aren't already reading it automatically.