The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System: A Gulf Science Portal
Abstract
The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System's (GCOOS) regional science portal (gcoos.org) was designed to aggregate data and model output from distributed providers and to offer these, and derived products, through a single access point in standardized ways to a diverse set of users. The portal evolved under the NOAA-led U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) program where automated largely-unattended machine-to-machine interoperability has always been a guiding tenet for system design. The web portal has a business unit where membership lists, new items, and reference materials are kept, a data portal where near real-time and historical data are held and served, and a products portal where data are fused into products tailored for specific or general stakeholder groups. The staff includes a system architect who built and maintains the data portal, a GIS expert who built and maintains the current product portal, the executive director who marshals resources to keep news items fresh and data manger who manages most of this. The business portal is built using WordPress which was selected because it appeared to be the easiest content management system for non-web programmers to add content to, maintain and enhance. The data portal is custom built and uses database, PHP, and web services based on Open Geospatial Consortium standards-based Sensor Observation Service (SOS) with Observations and Measurements (O&M) encodings. We employ a standards-based vocabulary, which we helped develop, which is registered at the Marine Metadata Interoperability Ontology Registry and Repository (http://mmisw.org). The registry is currently maintained by one of the authors. Products appearing in the products portal are primarily constructed using ESRI software by a Ph.D. level Geographer. Some products were built with other software, generally by graduate students over the years. We have been sensitive to the private sector when deciding which products to produce. While science users want numbers, users of all types mainly want maps. We have tried to develop flexible capabilities to present products for a variety of output devices, from desktop screens to the smart phones. Software maintenance is a continuing issue and new initiatives from NOAA add to the work load but improve the system. We will discuss how our data management system has evolved within the backdrop of rapidly changing technologies and diverse community requirements.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFMIN33B1547H
- Keywords:
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- 1904 INFORMATICS Community standards;
- 1908 INFORMATICS Cyberinfrastructure;
- 1928 INFORMATICS GIS science;
- 1976 INFORMATICS Software tools and services