PolarHub: A service-oriented cyberinfrastructure portal to support sustained polar sciences

• Main Author: Wenwen Li
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: Arctic Data Center 2017
• Subjects: Earth Sciences; Climate; Arctic; Atmosphere; Solid Earth
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.18739/A2ZZ3N

This project develop components of a polar cyberinfrastructure (CI) to support researchers and users for data discovery and access. The main goal is to provide tools that will enable a better access to polar data and information, hence allowing to spend more time on analysis and research, and significantly less time on discovery and searching. A large-scale web crawler, PolarHub, is developed to continuously mine the Internet to discover dispersed polar data. Beside identifying polar data in major data repositories, PolarHub is also able to bring individual hidden resources forward, hence increasing the discoverability of polar data. Quality and assessment of data resources are analyzed inside of PolarHub, providing a key tool for not only identifying issues but also to connect the research community with optimal data resources. In the current PolarHub system, seven different types of geospatial data and processing services that are compliant with OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) are supported in the system. They are: -- OGC Web Map Service (WMS): is a standard protocol for serving (over the Internet)georeferenced map images which a map server generates using data from a GIS database. -- OGC Web Feature Service (WFS): provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. -- OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS): Interface Standard defines Web-based retrieval of coverages; that is, digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena. -- OGC Web Map Tile Service (WMTS): is a standard protocol for serving pre-rendered georeferenced map tiles over the Internet. -- OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS): is a web service to query real-time sensor data and sensor data time series and is part of theSensor Web. The offered sensor data comprises descriptions of sensors themselves, which are encoded in the Sensor Model Language (SensorML), and the measured values in the Observations and Measurements (O and M) encoding format. -- OGC Web Processing Service (WPS): Interface Standard provides rules for standardizing how inputs and outputs (requests and responses) for invoking geospatial processing services, such as polygon overlay, as a web service. -- OGC Catalog Service for the Web (CSW): is a standard for exposing a catalogue of geospatial records in XML on the Internet (over HTTP). The catalogue is made up of records that describe geospatial data (e.g. KML), geospatial services (e.g. WMS), and related resources. PolarHub has three main functions: (1) visualization and metadata viewing of geospatial data services; (2) user-guided real-time data crawling; and (3) data filtering and search from PolarHub data repository.