Michael Piasecki

... ecosystems in coupling watersheds with oceans, and their support of secondary production. ... undergraduate students, and summer research for 6 high school science teachers, including 5 from ... to develop CUAHSI-HIS (now also part of WaTERs), educational outreach programs ...

Concentrated efforts over the past 50 years have dramatically improved the water quality of the Delaware Bay Estuary. From conditions that saw part of the estuary being "dead", the system has improved to a level where a significant amount of fauna and flora has reinstated itself; in fact, many water quality parameters reach state and federal standards. Yet, the diversity

Despite recent advances to present simulation results as 3D graphs or animation contours, the modeling user community still faces some shortcomings when trying to move around and analyze data. Typical problems include the lack of common platforms with standard vocabulary to exchange simulation results from different numerical models, insufficient descriptions about data (metadata), lack of robust search and retrieval tools for data, and difficulties to reuse simulation domain knowledge. This research demonstrates how to create a shared simulation domain in the WWW and run a number of models through multi-user interfaces. Firstly, meta-datasets have been developed to describe hydrodynamic model data based on geographic metadata standard (ISO 19115) that has been extended to satisfy the need of the hydrodynamic modeling community. The Extended Markup Language (XML) is used to publish this metadata by the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Specific domain ontology for Web Based Simulation (WBS) has been developed to explicitly define vocabulary for the knowledge based simulation system. Subsequently, this knowledge based system is converted into an object model using Meta Object Family (MOF). The knowledge based system acts as a Meta model for the object oriented system, which aids in reusing the domain knowledge. Specific simulation software has been developed based on the object oriented model. Finally, all model data is stored in an object relational database. Database back-ends help store, retrieve and query information efficiently. This research uses open source software and technology such as Java Servlet and JSP, Apache web server, Tomcat Servlet Engine, PostgresSQL databases, Protégé ontology editor, RDQL and RQL for querying RDF in semantic level, Jena Java API for RDF. Also, we use international standards such as the ISO 19115 metadata standard, and specifications such as XML, RDF, OWL, XMI, and UML. The final web based simulation product is deployed as Web Archive (WAR) files which is platform and OS independent and can be used by Windows, UNIX, or Linux. Keywords: Apache, ISO 19115, Java Servlet, Jena, JSP, Metadata, MOF, Linux, Ontology, OWL, PostgresSQL, Protégé, RDF, RDQL, RQL, Tomcat, UML, UNIX, Windows, WAR, XML

ABSTRACT A long-term hydrologic observatory is proposed for an area encompassing the Potomac River Basin and the basins that form the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay from the Gunpowder River on the north to the Rappahannock River on the south. The area is approximately 52,000 sq km and spans five physiographic provinces, with total relief of about 1200 m, and includes parts of MD, VA, PA, WV, and DC. The Potomac and adjacent mid-Atlantic drainage are characterized by a high frequency of floods and droughts, with attendant concerns about flood hazards and about the reliability of water supply. As of 2000, the population of the proposed study area was 8.26 million, with the highest density in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan region. Land use is 45 percent forested, 32 percent agriculture, 5.7 percent developed, and 4.8 percent open water. Heterogeneous natural landscape patterns have been influenced by the legacy of four centuries of human disturbance, including a wave of deforestation, agricultural land use, and land abandonment leading to reforestation contemporaneous with some of the most rapidly expanding urban areas in the U.S. A wealth of existing instrumented field sites forms a network of resources that will be woven together as part of this effort, including: the USGS NAWQA study in the Potomac River Basin; the NSF-funded Baltimore LTER; USDA-ARS sites in Beltsville, MD; the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin's work in overseeing management of the Potomac River; the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center's field sites, and active field sites of major research universities located in the region. This effort represents a significant partnership with local district offices of the U.S. Geological Survey. This poster presents study area attributes, preliminary study design, and a proposed core data program. The program is designed to attract researchers in the following areas of scientific inquiry: (1) orographic precipitation mechanisms, runoff generation, and groundwater recharge; (2) sediment sources, storage, and delivery, floodplain processes, and fate of sediment-associated contaminants; (3) biogeochemical cycling and sources and sinks of nutrients and toxic contaminants in the landscape from non-tidal uplands to estuarine waters; (4) defining water needs to support ecosystems, and moving the science of restoration to an integrated biophysical enterprise; and (5) urban development, infrastructure, and consequent transformation of hydrologic landscapes and processes.

The recent emergence of a number of Environmental Observing systems calls the for the need of a nationwide geoscience cyberinfrastructure. One of the problems that need to be overcome when building a nationwide CI is the vexing problem of disparate and incompatible metadata descriptions that exist due to the use of different standards (if at all) and also the use

A new project is underway to develop and deploy a Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO), which is intended to serve as a prototype of cyberinfrastructure (CI) for environmental observatory networks (EONs) that will demonstrate the transformative power of CI. The CBEO will be developed by a team of highly qualified computer scientists, ecologists, oceanographers and environmental engineers with a track

Success in data discovery relies on the quality of metadata. Information systems design and user's willingness are two important factors determining completeness and correctness of metadata. Controlled vocabularies are very useful for annotating data with relevant information however they do not always guarantee homogeneity. For example in EPA STORET 37.7% of `Precipitation' data is indexed as `Medium=Air' while the rest

The National Weather Service (NWS) Office of Hydrologic Development (OHD) has been sponsoring the development of the HydroXC initiative, which is now in Phase III. The overall goal of this initiative, which is also supported by a consortium comprised of members of the ...

Search engines have changed the way we see the Internet. The ability to find the information by just typing in keywords was a big contribution to the overall web experience. While the conventional search engine methodology worked well for textual documents, locating scientific data remains a problem since they are stored in databases not readily accessible by search engine bots.

Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO) is an NSF-supported project focused on studying hypoxia in Chesapeake Bay using advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) technologies. The project is organized around four concurrent and interacting activities: 1) CBEO:S provides science and management context for the use of CI technologies, focusing on hypoxia and its non-linear dynamics as affected by management and climate; 2) CBEO:T constructs

Abstract The inadequacies of water cycle observations for monitoring long-term changes in the global water system, as well as their feedback into the climate system, poses a major constraint on sustainable development of water resources and improvement of water management practices. Hence, The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) has established Task WA-08-01," Integration of in situ and satellite data for water cycle monitoring," an integrative initiative combining different types of satellite and in situ observations related to ...

ABSTRACT A semantic web ontology enables semantic data integration and semantic smart searching. Several organizations have attempted to implement smart registration and integration or searching using ontologies. These are the NOESIS (NSF project: LEAD) and HydroSeek (NSF project: CUAHS HIS) data discovery engines and the NSF project GEON. All three applications use ontologies to discover data from multiple sources and projects. The NASA WaterNet project was established to identify creative, innovative ways to bridge NASA research results to real world applications, linking decision support needs to available data, observations, and modeling capability. WaterNet (NASA project) utilized the smart query tool Noesis as a testbed to test whether different ontologies (and different catalog searches) could be combined to match resources with user needs. NOESIS contains the upper level SWEET ontology that accepts plug in domain ontologies to refine user search queries, reducing the burden of multiple keyword searches. Another smart search interface was that developed for CUAHSI, HydroSeek, that uses a multi-layered concept search ontology, tagging variables names from any number of data sources to specific leaf and higher level concepts on which the search is executed. This approach has proven to be quite successful in mitigating semantic heterogeneity as the user does not need to know the semantic specifics of each data source system but just uses a set of common keywords to discover the data for a specific temporal and geospatial domain. This presentation will show tests with Noesis and Hydroseek lead to the conclusion that the construction of a complex, and highly heterogeneous water cycle ontology requires multiple ontology modules. To illustrate the complexity and heterogeneity of a water cycle ontology, Hydroseek successfully utilizes WaterOneFlow to integrate data across multiple different data collections, such as USGS NWIS. However,different methodologies are employed by the Earth Science, the Hydrological, and Hydraulic Engineering Communities, and each community employs models that require different input data. If a sub-domain ontology is created for each of these,describing water balance calculations, then the resulting structure of the semantic network describing these various terms can be rather complex, heterogeneous, and overlapping, and will require "mapping" between equivalent terms in the ontologies, along with the development of an upper level conceptual or domain ontology to utilize and link to those already in existence.

This poster presents the conceptual development of a Hydrologic Ontology for the Web (HOW) that will facilitate data sharing among the hydrologic community. Hydrologic data is difficult to share because of its predicted vast increase in data volume, the availability of new measurement technologies and the heterogeneity of information systems used to produced, store, retrieved and used the data. The augmented capacity of the Internet and the technologies recommended by the W3C, as well as metadata standards provide sophisticated means to make data more usable and systems to be more integrated. Standard metadata is commonly used to solve interoperability issues. For the hydrologic field an explicit metadata standard does not exist, but one could be created extending metadata standards such as the FGDC-STD-001-1998 or ISO 19115. Standard metadata defines a set of elements required to describe data in a consistent manner, and their domains are sometimes restricted by a finite set of values or controlled vocabulary (e.g. code lists in ISO/DIS 19115). This controlled vocabulary is domain specific varying from one information community to another, allowing dissimilar descriptions to similar data sets. This issue is sometimes called semantic non-interoperability or semantic heterogeneity, and it is usually the main problem when sharing data. Explicit domain ontologies could be created to provide semantic interoperability among heterogeneous information communities. Domain ontologies supply the values for restricted domains of some elements in the metadata set and the semantic mapping with other domain ontologies. To achieve interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web, metadata is expressed using Resource Description Framework (RDF) and domain ontologies are expressed using the Ontology Web Language (OWL), which is also based on RDF. A specific OWL ontology for hydrology is HOW. HOW presents, using a formal syntax, the main concepts of hydrologic data and the semantic mappings with other domain ontologies. Using the RDF model and syntax so-called agents, or other specific applications, are able to transverse the domain ontologies and perform semantic queries providing "intelligent results" from heterogeneous information systems.