iData: a community geospatial data sharing environment to support data-driven science

Abstract

With the advent of XSEDE, the national cyberinfrastructure has evolved from a set of traditional HPC resources to a broader range of digital services. Science gateways, which serve as portals to scientific applications, have also evolved as researchers are dealing with rapidly expanding scientific datasets and the increasingly complex workflows. More and more gateways are being developed to support integrated services for running data-driven applications on HPC resources such as those on XSEDE. To facilitate this type of workflow, there is a pressing need for web-based data management systems that are easy to use, support data upload, sharing, access and management, and can be integrated with advanced computation and storage resources. More importantly such systems need to be accessible by users from the broad research and education communities. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of iData, a web-based community data publishing and sharing system. iData supports both generic file-based data collections and several commonly used environmental data collection formats including time series, GIS vector and raster data. Integrated data processing, visualization and filtering capabilities are provided for these data formats. Currently iData can be downloaded and deployed in a HUBzero-based gateway, and we plan to make it available for non-HUBzero platforms in the future. We present two examples in which iData has been successfully used to support research collaboration in driNET and GEOSHARE projects.