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Published on Wednesday, 31 October 2018 20:00

By Nayiri Mullinix

“The Focus Week experience was still fresh in our minds. We applied lessons learned there even during proposal writing – from identifying audiences, clearly connecting activities to goals and outcomes, to developing a sustainability plan. GeoEDF will utilize SGCI consulting services on usability and user-centered design and impact assessment, and leverage the SGCI student internship program.”

Carol Song of Purdue University and four co-PIs, including Jack Smith of Marshall University, have been awarded a five-year, $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Both Song and Smith participated in SGCI’s Gateway Focus Week while working on separate gateway projects.

The grant will allow the team to build a “plug and play” platform, to be called GeoEDF, that will give researchers the ability to easily access and process geospatial data.

Song considers this new gateway as a successor to the Geospatial Data Analysis Building Blocks (GABBs) project, for which Song attended the Focus Week. GeoEDF will improve upon existing geospatial data processing tools to give researchers an easy-to-use and simplified science gateway that can be used to retrieve and process only the data they need and transform it into standardized formats that can be used for modeling and analysis.

Song, who attended the October 2017 Focus Week, commented on the value of the GeoDEF project and how SGCI services have and will continue to support her work. “We are excited about the new project, an opportunity for us to build on GABBs to make large, valuable scientific and social data sets accessible and usable for researchers. My team has benefited from previous interactions with SGCI. The Focus Week experience was still fresh in our minds. We applied lessons learned there even during proposal writing – from identifying audiences, clearly connecting activities to goals and outcomes, to developing a sustainability plan. GeoEDF will utilize SGCI consulting services on usability and user-centered design and impact assessment, and leverage the SGCI student internship program.”

Smith, who participated in the first Focus Week in April 2017, added, “This collaboration between Purdue and Marshall would not have occurred without my participation in the XSEDE Campus Champion Fellows program or the various activities of the Science Gateways Community Institute, such as the Focus Week, Gateways Conferences, or the Extended Developer Support service area. This grant offers a great opportunity to build on the success of two other NSF grant-funded projects that Marshall participates in that address water quality issues in the Appalachian region. These projects share a collaboration portal similar to MyGeoHub for collecting and sharing data with researchers across the region. GeoEDF will allow such portals to exchange and analyze data on a national scale using a common framework.”

The GeoEDF team includes five people, with co-principal investigators who will serve as use cases for GeoEDF:

• Carol Song, PI, is Director of Scientific Solutions, Research Computing at Purdue University.

• Jian Jin, co-PI, is an assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University developing a handheld crop scanner that will allow farmers to get information about the health of their plans by scanning a leaf.

• Venkatesh Merwade, co-PI, is a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University who will use GeoEDF for floor modeling with a state-of-the-art hydrologic model.

• Uris Baldos, co-PI, is a research assistant professor in agricultural economics at Purdue University who will use GeoEDF to integrate socio-economic data with environmental data to study the consequences of changing land use.

• Jack Smith, co-PI, is a senior research staff member of the Center for Environmental, Geotechnical and Applied Sciences at Marshall University who will use GeoEDF to process water quality data from field sensors to Appalachia and convert it into standard EPA format for processing.

Congratulations to the GeoEDF team!

Want to know more about the team's work? Check out this Science Node article.