Linking Model Metadata to Earth System Grid

Participants

Rocky Dunlap, Georgia Institute of Technology, Sylvia Murphy/ESMF Core Team, Cecelia DeLuca/ESMF Core Team, Julien Chastang/NCAR

For questions on this project, please contact curator@list.woc.noaa.gov.

Motivation

End-to-end modeling is a workflow in the broadest sense that takes metadata embedded within geoscience models and transfers it to a science gateway where it can be used to explore, compare, and describe model components. It represents the future paradigm for both model development and model run production. Curator is involved in the facilitation of end-to-end modeling at various stages in the pipeline. We are involved in the creation of web service interfaces, which enable different types of models to interact over the Internet. We are working to enhance the Earth System Grid to make it a metadata enhanced scientific gateway, and we are working to enable the seamless transfer of model metadata into science gateways. The latter is the focus of this web page.

Approach

Use of XML

XML is the ideal transmission device to transfer information along the entire end-to-end workflow. It is universal, easily absorbed and displayed using variety of ways using standard tools.

Self-describing Models

The Curator project has been working to make models self-describing through the creation of an ESMF Attribute Class. ESMF Attributes can be used to describe Components, Fields, FieldBundles, Arrays, ArrayBundles, and Grids. ESMF Attributes come the form of hierarchal standard packages that can be nested together as well as customized. The attributes can be exported from the model in the form of a tab-deliminated text file and also as XML. In the future, additional formats are planned.

Ingestation of XML into ESG

Curator's Rocky Dunlap created a software system to take an XML file exported by an ESMF component and import it into ESG. Below is a diagram of this system. The metadata is harvested and placed into a series of Java objects. These objects enable the metadata to be transferred to a relational database. ESG then converts the information in the database to RDF and places it in a Sesame Store. This store can then be searched with the results being displayed on the web via a user gateways.