GEON (GEOscience Network): A First Step in Creating Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences

A new buzz-word that we will be hearing in the future is cyberinfrastructure. This term refers to the information technology infrastructure that is needed to (1) manage, preserve, and efficiently access the vast amounts of Earth science data that exist now and the vast data flows that will be coming online as projects such as EarthScope get going; (2) foster integrated scientific studies that are required to address the increasingly complex scientific problems that face our scientific community; (3) accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and facilitate innovation; (4) create an environment in which data and software developed with public funds are preserved and made available in a timely fashion; and (5) provide easy access to high-end computational power, visualization, and open-source software to researchers and students. The task of creating a cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences is daunting due to the large volume and diversity of our data, as well as the extreme differences in data formats, storage, and computing systems, plus differing conventions, terminologies, and ontological frameworks across disciplines. One way to think about this is that the ultimate goal is to provide you with the tools and data that you need to do better, more creative science by minimizing the effort needed to look for data, research the background of a topic, and make software run properly. Another consideration is that when data and information are entered into an organized system, they can be easily found and unexpected relationships can be discovered via queries in a Google-like fashion. Think about discovering many of the relationships between phenomena that led to understanding plate tectonics in days instead of years. Within the Division of Earth Sciences of the National Science Foundation, the effort to create the cyberinfrastructure that we need is referred to as Geoinformatics (http://www.geoinformatics.org), which arose out of …