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Title
FOSS GEOSPATIAL LIBRARIES IN SCIENTIFIC WORKFLOW ENVIRONMENTS: EXPERIENCES AND DIRECTIONS
Abstract
In numerous research fields, scientists are increasingly turning to e-science and specifically scientific workflows as a way of improving, widening and hastening their results. Enhanced collaboration, on-demand access to tools, data and high performance processing facilities are some of the gains to be made. Scientific workflows are concerned with supporting the repeatability and provenance of experiments. Scientific workflows have had a measure of success in the astronomy,bio-informatics,chem-informatics, geophysics and eco-informatics domains (Gil et. al., 2007) This paper describes our initial investigations into developing geospatial Scientific Workflows to support researchers in exploring, integrating and visualising Earth Observation and GIS data in conjunction with other research data. We describe some of the functionalities we require in the context of three sets of research endeavour - wildfire research, flood modelling and the linking of disease outbreaks to multi-scale environmental conditions. We note the relative lack of support for geospatial data, services and functions within some of the FOSS Scientific Workflow packages. This paper highlights challenges and results of utilising various FOSS geospatial libraries within these Scientific Workflow environments.
References
Y. Gil, E. Deelman, M. Ellisman, T. Fahringer, G. Fox, D. Gannon, C. Goble, M. Livny, L. Moreau and J. Myers, “Examining the Challenges of Scientific Workflows”. IEEE
Computer, vol. 40, no. 12, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 2432, December, 2007
Authors
Graeme Mcferren - CSIR Meraka Insitute
Terence Van Zyl - CSIR Meraka Insitute
