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December 3-7 in San Francisco |
2012 has been an extraordinarily busy and productive year for those of us at the Arizona Geological Survey. As a result, we’ll have a larger than usual presence at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, 3-7 December 2012. Fifteen staff members working on an array of projects hammered out seven abstracts, including one oral and six poster presentations; see titles, authors, times and locations, and abstracts below. AZGS Director Lee Allison will also be co-convening two sessions: A Governance Roadmap for Cyberinfrastructure in the Geosciences and Towards a Global Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences.
And tune in to Lee Allison’s blog Arizona Geology for reports on AGU activity and events.
While at AGU, we invite you to visit AZGS-staffed exhibit booths:
- National Geothermal Data System (NGDS) (booth 104) - with live demonstrations of the search and analytic capabilities of the NGDS. (For more information see our NGDS brochure.)
- EarthCube (booth 142) – learn how EarthCube is engaging geo, ocean, and atmospheric scientists in the development of community-guided cyberinfrastructure that will transform how scientists share, discover and access data.
AZGS Presentations and Sessions at AGU Fall 2012 Meeting
Allison, M. Lee, Rowena Davis, F Michael Conway, and Randi Bellassai, “The Virtual Arizona Experience,” American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, December 3, 2012 [poster], 8:00 AM - 12:20 PM, Hall A-C Moscone South
Kim Patten; M L. Allison; Stephen M. Richard; Ryan Clark; Diane Love; Celia Coleman; Christy Caudill; Jordan Matti; Leah Musil; Janel Day; Genhan Chen; Esty Pape, “National Geothermal Data System: State Geological Survey Contributions to Date,” American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, December 3, 2012 [oral], 11:50am-12:05pm, 104 Moscone South
Allison, M. Lee, Co-convener, American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Technical Session Co-convener, “A Governance Roadmap for Cyberinfrastructure in the Geosciences” December 4, 2012 [posters], Hall A-C Moscone South
Allison, M. Lee, presenter on behalf of the EarthCube Governance Steering Committee, “A Governance Roadmap and Framework for EarthCube,” American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, December 4, 2012 [poster], 8:00 AM - 12:20 PM, Hall A-C Moscone South
Van Daalen, Tirza, and M. Lee Allison (presenter), “OneGeology – a geoscience exemplar for worldwide cyberinfrastructure capacity-building and scientific innovation,” American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, December 4, 2012 [poster], 8:00 AM - 12:20 PM, Hall A-C Moscone South
Pearthree, Genevieve, and M. Lee Allison (presenter), “Mayor of EarthCube: Cities as an Analogue for Cyberinfrastructure,” American Geophysical Union, San Francisco, December 4, 2012 [poster], 8:00 AM - 12:20 PM, Hall A-C Moscone South
Allison, M. Lee, Co-convener, American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Union Session, “Towards a Global Cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences,” December 5, 2012 [oral], 10:20 AM - 12:20 PM; 102 Moscone South
Stephen M. Richard; Interoperability Working Group Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information, IUGS, “GeoSciML and EarthResourceML Update, 2012,” American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, December 5, 2012 [poster], 8:00 AM - 12:20 PM, Hall A-C Moscone South
Nils Moosdorf; Stephen M. Richard, “A Lithology Based Map Unit Schema For Onegeology Regional Geologic Map Integration,” American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, December 7, 2012 [poster], 8:00 AM - 12:20 PM, Hall A-C, Moscone South |
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The Virtual Arizona Experience |
December 3
[poster]
8:00A-12:20P Hall A-C
Moscone South |
 M. L. Allison1; R. Davis1; F. M. Conway1; R. Bellasai1 1. Arizona Geological Survey, Tucson, AZ, United States. Body: To commemorate the once-in-a-lifetime event of Arizona's hundredth birthday, the Centennial Commission and
the Governor of Arizona envisioned a museum and companion website that would capture the state's history,
celebrate its people, and embrace its future. Working with world-renowned museum designers, the state began to
seek ideas from across Arizona to create plans for a journey of discovery through science and the humanities. The
museum would introduce visitors to some of the people who nurtured the state through its early years and others who
are innovating its tomorrows. Showcases would include the resources and experiences that shaped the state's history
and are transforming its present day, highlighting the ingenuity that tamed the wild frontier and is envisioning Arizona's
next frontiers through science and technology. The Arizona Experience (www.arizonaexperience.org) was initially intended to serve as the web presence for the
physical museum, but as delays occurred with the physical museum, the site has quickly developed an identify of its
own as an interactive, multimedia experience, reaching a wider audience with functions that would be difficult or
expensive to produce in a museum. As leaders in scientific and technological innovation in the state, the Arizona
Geological Survey was tasked with designing and creating the Arizona Experience site. The general themes remain
the same; however, the site has added content and applications that are better suited to the online environment in
order to create a rich, dynamic supplement to a physical museum experience. The website offers the features and
displays of the future museum with the interactive nature and learning environment of the web. This provides an
encyclopedic overview of the State of Arizona by subject matter experts in a manner that is free and open to the public
and erases socio-economic, political, and physical boundaries. Over the Centennial Year of 2012 the site will release a new theme and explore the people, land, and innovations that
shape the themes. Themes include (in order of release) Celebrates, Mining & Minerals, Biotech & Life Sciences,
Sports & Recreation, Energy, Water, Technology & Aerospace, People & Culture, Ranching & Agriculture, Native
American Culture, Astronomy, 21st Century Workforce, and a Best of 2012 release. The materials developed for the
site come from content matter experts across the state including academic institutions, historical societies, museums,
and professional associations. Currently there are over 300 content providers contributing resources, data, and videos
to the site. AZGS interactions with science and technology organizations, associations, and businesses have been critical as we
work to engage visitors and industry with the opportunities in Arizona, and translate innovative research and scientific
application for a more generalized audience. In addition, we are involving K-12 educators in using the site content
and cutting edge technology for developing classroom STEM related content linked to curriculum subject areas.
URL: www.arizonaexperience.org
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National Geothermal Data System: State Geological Survey Contributions to Date |
December 3
[oral]
11:50A-12:05P
104 Moscone South |
M. L. Allison1; K. Patten1; S. M. Richard1; R. Clark1; D. Love1; C. Coleman1; C. Caudill1; J. Matti1; L. Musil1; J. Day1; G. Chen1; E. Pape1
1. Arizona Geological Survey, Tucson, AZ, United States. Body: In collaboration with the Association of American State Geologists the Arizona Geological Survey is leading the
effort to bring legacy geothermal data to the U.S. Department of Energy's National Geothermal Data System (NGDS).
NGDS is a national, sustainable, distributed, interoperable network of data and service (application) providers entering
its final stages of development. Once completed the geothermal industry, the public, and policy makers will have
access to consistent and reliable data, which in turn, reduces the amount of staff time devoted to finding, retrieving,
integrating, and verifying information. With easier access to information, the high cost and risk of geothermal power
projects (especially exploration drilling) is reduced. This presentation focuses on the scientific and data integration
methodology as well as State Geological Survey contributions to date. The NGDS is built using the U.S. Geoscience Information Network (USGIN) data integration framework to promote
interoperability across the Earth sciences community and with other emerging data integration and networking efforts.
Core to the USGIN concept is that of data provenance; by allowing data providers to maintain and house their data. After concluding the second year of the project, we have nearly 800 datasets representing over 2 million data points
from the state geological surveys. A new AASG specific search catalog based on popular internet search formats
enables end users to more easily find and identify geothermal resources in a specific region. Sixteen states, including
a consortium of Great Basin states, have initiated new field data collection for submission to the NGDS. The new field
data includes data from at least 21 newly drilled thermal gradient holes in previously unexplored areas. Most of the datasets provided to the NGDS are being portrayed as Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map
Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS), meaning that the data is compatible with a variety of visualization
software. Web services are ideal for the NGDS data for a number of reasons including that they preserve data
ownership in that they are read only and new services can be deployed to meet new requirements without modifying
existing applications. URL: www.stategeothermaldata.org
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A Governance Roadmap and Framework for EarthCube |
December 4
[poster]
8:00A-12:20P
Hall A-C
Moscone South |
M. L. Allison1
1. Arizona Geological Survey, Tucson, AZ, United States.
Body: EarthCube is a process and an outcome, established to transform the conduct of research through the
development of community-guided cyberinfrastructure for the Geosciences as the prototype for potential deployment
across all domain sciences. EarthCube aims to create a knowledge management system and infrastructure that
integrates all Earth system and human dimensions data in an open transparent, and inclusive manner. EarthCube
requires broad community participation in concept, framework, and implementation and must not be hindered by rigid
preconceptions.
We discovered widely varying interpretations, expectations, and assumptions about governance among EarthCube
participants. Our definition of governance refers to the processes, structure and organizational elements that
determine, within an organization or system of organizations, how power is exercised, how stakeholders have their
say, how decisions are made, and how decision makers are held accountable.
We have learned, from historic infrastructure case studies, background research on governance and from community
feedback during this roadmap process, that other types of large-scale, complex infrastructures, including the Internet,
have no central control, administration, or management. No national infrastructure that we examined is governed by
a single entity, let alone a single governance archetype. Thus we feel the roadmap process must accommodate a
governance system or system of systems that may have a single governing entity, particularly at the start, but can
evolve into a collective of governing bodies as warranted, in order to be successful.
A fast-track process during Spring, 2012 culminated in a Governance Roadmap delivered to an NSF-sponsored
charrette in June with an aggressive timetable to define and implement a governance structure to enable the elements
of EarthCube to become operational expeditiously.
Our goal is to help ensure the realization of this infrastructure sooner, more efficiently, and more effectively, by
providing a community endorsed Governance Framework. The Framework, and corresponding community outreach,
will maximize engagement of the broader EarthCube community, which in turn will minimize the risks that the
community will not adopt EarthCube in its development and final states. The target community includes academia,
government, and the private-sector, both nationally and internationally.
Based on community feedback to-date, we compiled and synthesized system-wide governance requirements to draft
an initial set of EarthCube Governance functions. These functions will permit us to produce a Governance Framework
based on an aggressive community outreach and engagement plan.
URL: http://earthcube.ning.com/group/governance
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OneGeology – a geoscience exemplar for worldwide cyberinfrastructure capacity-building and scientific innovation |
December 4
[poster]
8:00A-12:20P
Hall A-C
Moscone South |
M. L. Allison2; T. van Daalen1
1. Geological Survey of the Netherlands, TNO, Utrecht, Netherlands.
2. Arizona Geological Survey, Tucson, AZ, United States.
Body: OneGeology is a trail-blazing global initiative that has helped propel the geosciences into the forefront of
cyberinfrastructure development with potentially transformative impacts on scientific and technical innovation across
broad areas of society. In the five years since its launch, 117 nations, through their Geological Surveys have signed
the OneGeology protocols and nearly half are serving up national geological maps as Web services at varying scales,
with the remainder developing those capabilities. In federal systems, states and provinces are increasingly adding
higher resolution spatial data to the national contributions to the global system.
The OneGeology concept of a distributed, open-source, Web-service based network has become the archetype for
transforming data into knowledge and innovation. This is not only revolutionizing the geosciences but offering
opportunities for governments to use these cutting-edge capabilities for broad innovation and capacity building.
Across the globe, communities are facing the same four challenges: put simply, how do we best make data
discoverable, shareable, viewable and downloadable, so that the user also has access to consistent data at a national
and continental level? The principle of managing scientific and societal data and knowledge where they are generated
and are best understood is well established in the geoscience community and can be scaled up and transferred to
other domains and sectors of society. The distributed nature of most data sources means the complementary delivery
mechanism of Web map services has become equally prevalent in the spatial data community. Together these factors
are driving a world-wide revolution in the way spatial information is being disseminated to its users. Industry,
academia, and governments are quickly adopting and adapting to this new paradigm and discovering that very modest
investments in this emerging field are reaping tremendous returns in national capacity and triggering a wave of
innovation and economic development symptomatic of previous deployment of new infrastructures, from
transportation networks to the electrical grid to the Internet.
OneGeology continues to implement and deploy critical cyberinfrastructure capabilities in best practices, definitions,
and standards on data management. The global adoption of OneGeology is also lowering the barriers to accessing
the world's digital resources.
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The Mayor of EarthCube: Cities as an Analogue for Governing Cyberinfrastructure |
December 4
[poster]
8:00A-12:20P
Hall A-C
Moscone South |
M. L. Allison1; G. M. Pearthree1; K. Patten1
1. Arizona Geological Survey, Tucson, AZ, United States.
Body: Historical development of national and global infrastructure follows common paths with common imperatives.
The nascent development may be led a by champion, innovator, or incubating organization. Once the infrastructure
reaches a tipping point and adoption spreads rapidly, the organization and governance evolves in concert. Ultimately,
no wide-spread infrastructure (from canals to highways to the electric grid to radio/television, or the Internet) operates
with a single overarching governing body.
The NSF EarthCube initiative is a prototype implementation of cyberinfrastructure, using the broad geoscience
community as the testbed. Governance for EarthCube is emulating the pattern of other infrastructure, which we argue
is a system of systems that can be described by organized complexity, emergent systems, and non-linear
thermodynamics.
As we consider governance cyberinfrastructure in the geosciences, we might look to cities as analogs: cities provide
services such as fire, police, water, and trash collection. Cities issue permits and often oversee zoning, but much of
what defines cities is outside the direct control of city government. Businesses choose whether to locate there, where
to operate, and what to build. Residents make similar decisions. State and federal agencies make decisions or
impose criteria that greatly affect cities, without necessarily getting agreement from them. City government must thus
operate at multiple levels - providing oversight and management of city services, interaction with residents,
businesses, and visitors, and dealing with actions and decisions made by independent entities over which they have
little or no control.
Cities have a range of organizational and management models, ranging from city managers, councils, and weak to
strong mayors, some elected directly, some chosen from councils.
The range and complexity of governance issues in building, operating, and sustaining cyberinfrastructure in the
geosciences and beyond, rival those of running a medium to large city. The range of organizational and management
structures in meeting community needs and goals are also diverse and may embody a multi-faceted set of governing
archetypes, best suited to carry out each of myriad functions.
We envision cyberinfrastructure governance to be a community-driven enterprise empowered to carry out a dynamic
set of functions, operating within a set of processes (comparable to a city charter) and guiding principles (constitution).
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GeoSciML and EarthResourceML Update, 2012 |
December 5
[poster]
8:00A-12:20P
Hall A-C
Moscone South |
S. M. Richard1,2; I. Commission for the Management and Application Inte2
1. Arizona Geological Survey, Tucson, AZ, United States.
2. Interoperability Working Group, Commission for the Management and Application International Union of Geological
Sciences, Hannover, Germany.
Body: CGI Interoperability Working Group activities during 2012 include deployment of services using the GeoSciMLPortrayal
schema, addition of new vocabularies to support properties added in version 3.0, improvements to server
software for deploying services, introduction of EarthResourceML v.2 for mineral resources, and collaboration with the
IUSS on a markup language for soils information. GeoSciML and EarthResourceML have been used as the basis for
the INSPIRE Geology and Mineral Resources specifications respectively. GeoSciML-Portrayal is an OGC GML
simple-feature application schema for presentation of geologic map unit, contact, and shear displacement structure
(fault and ductile shear zone) descriptions in web map services. Use of standard vocabularies for geologic age and
lithology enables map services using shared legends to achieve visual harmonization of maps provided by different
services. New vocabularies have been added to the collection of CGI vocabularies provided to support interoperable
GeoSciML services, and can be accessed through http://resource.geosciml.org. Concept URIs can be dereferenced to
obtain SKOS rdf or html representations using the SISSVoc vocabulary service. New releases of the FOSS
GeoServer application greatly improve support for complex XML feature schemas like GeoSciML, and the ArcGIS for
INSPIRE extension implements similar complex feature support for ArcGIS Server. These improved server
implementations greatly facilitate deploying GeoSciML services. EarthResourceML v2 adds features for information
related to mining activities. SoilML provides an interchange format for soil material, soil profile, and terrain information.
Work is underway to add GeoSciML to the portfolio of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications.
URL: http://resource.geosciml.org
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A Lithology Based Map Unit Schema For Onegeology Regional Geologic Map Integration |
December 7
[poster]
8:00A-12:20P
Hall A-C
Moscone South |
S. M. Richard2; N. Moosdorf1
1. IFBM, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
2. Arizona Geological Survey, Tucson, AZ, United States.
Body: A system of lithogenetic categories for a global lithological map (GLiM,
http://www.ifbm.zmaw.de/index.php?id=6460&L=3) has been compiled based on analysis of lithology/genesis
categories for regional geologic maps for the entire globe. The scheme is presented for discussion and comment.
Analysis of units on a variety of regional geologic maps indicates that units are defined based on assemblages of rock
types, as well as their genetic type. In this compilation of continental geology, outcropping surface materials are
dominantly sediment/sedimentary rock; major subdivisions of the sedimentary category include clastic sediment,
carbonate sedimentary rocks, clastic sedimentary rocks, mixed carbonate and clastic sedimentary rock, colluvium and
residuum. Significant areas of mixed igneous and metamorphic rock are also present. A system of global categories to
characterize the lithology of regional geologic units is important for Earth System models of matter fluxes to soils,
ecosystems, rivers and oceans, and for regional analysis of Earth surface processes at global scale. Because different
applications of the classification scheme will focus on different lithologic constituents in mixed units, an ontology-type
representation of the scheme that assigns properties to the units in an analyzable manner will be pursued.
The OneGeology project is promoting deployment of geologic map services at million scale for all nations. Although
initial efforts are commonly simple scanned map WMS services, the intention is to move towards data-based map
services that categorize map units with standard vocabularies to allow use of a common map legend for better visual
integration of the maps (e.g. see OneGeology Europe, http://onegeology-europe.brgm.fr/ geoportal/ viewer.jsp).
Current categorization of regional units with a single lithology from the CGI SimpleLithology
(http://resource.geosciml.org/201202/ Vocab2012html/ SimpleLithology201012.html) vocabulary poorly captures the
lithologic character of such units in a meaningful way. A lithogenetic unit category scheme accessible as a GeoSciMLportrayal-
based OGC Styled Layer Description resource is key to enabling OneGeology (http://oneGeology.org)
geologic map services to achieve a high degree of visual harmonization.
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