Dogan Seber is Director of the DAKS Geoinformatics Lab at the as the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Seber is also serving as project manager on the NSF large Information Technology Research project, GEON, for Geosciences Network, for which SDSC is coordinating IT research. Seber received his undergraduate degree in geophysics from the Istanbul Technical University in his native Turkey, and his Ph.D. in seismology and geophysics from Cornell. Seber came to SDSC in 2003 from Cornell University, where he established and directed the Earth Science Information Systems Program in the Institute for the Study of the Continents, a project to develop a comprehensive geological and geophysical digital database system primarily for the Middle East, North Africa, and the United States. One of the largest programs of its kind in the nation, the interactive Web-based system (http://atlas.geo.cornell.edu/) serves hundreds of users daily ranging from geoscientists to elementary school students. Seber and other "early adopters" of geoinformatics in the GEON collaboration have a vision of a geosciences cyberinfrastructure that will help scientists solve earth science problems faster and on a larger scale, ultimately enabling them to encompass the entire Earth system.
Abstract
Taking advantage of the state-of-the-art information technology resources GEON is building a cyberinfrastructure to enable data sharing, semantic data integration, high-end computations and 4D visualization in easy-to-use web-based environments. The GEON Network currently allows users to search and register Earth science resources such as data sets, software applications and ontologies. Portal based access mechanisms enable developers to built dynamic user interfaces to conduct advanced processing and modeling efforts across distributed computers and supercomputers. Researchers and educators can access the networked resources through the GEON portal to conduct better and more comprehensive science and educational studies. For example, the SYNSEIS portlet in GEON enables users to access in near-real time seismic waveforms from the IRIS Data Management Center, easily build a 3D geologic model within the area of the seismic station(s) and the epicenter and perform a 3D synthetic seismogram analysis to understand the lithospheric structure and earthquake source parameters for any given earthquake in the US. Similarly, GEON's workbench area enables users to create their own work environment and copy, visualize and analyze any data sets within the network, and create subsets of the data sets for their own purposes. Since all these resources are built as part of a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA), they are also used in other development platforms. Developments in the area of semantic integration of the networked datasets continue to advance and prototype studies can be accessed via the GEON portal at www.geongrid.org
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