EarthCube Conceptual Design:

Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences

http://workspace.earthcube.org/transformative-research-collaboration

ILYA ZASLAVSKY, DAVID VALENTINE, AMARNATH GUPTA San Diego Supercomputer Center/UCSD

STEPHEN RICHARD Arizona Geological Survey

TANU MALIK University of Chicago

Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences

The Science Enterprise

• Ask questions• Collect information• Formulate hypotheses• Test hypotheses to

determine which (if any) provide satisfactory answer

• Document, curate, anddisseminate data and results. …. AND INCREASINGLY:

• Integrate data, analyses, models across domains

• Collaborate: leverage pooled expertise and resources

Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences

Design Framework: Federation of Systems

Research enterprise includes subsystems at the project, program and agency level, many of which are independent of NSF• Requirements are a moving target• Emergent behavior is to be expected• Technology is constantly changing• Community governance within constraints of funding agencies• Evolutionary process and adaptation:

• Lots of variation; Mechanism to select ‘fittest’; Composability

• Technology must foster delegation of responsibilities and communication:

• Promote self-organization, Cultivate ideas, Maintain feedback between subsystems

• Reliability: responsiveness, robustness, correctness• Identity of system is based on shared goals and practices

Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences

Communication loops

Bottom-up Studies

Top-down Studies

Cross-Domain Scientists

Trends andPatterns

Data interoperability best practices

Scientific Governance

Success stories

Technical Governance

Data Providers

Feasibility

Priorities

Strategies

Data Products

Options

Costs

Problems and issues

Related work

Questions and clarifications

Questions and clarifications

Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences

Communication metrics

Components and Perspectives on EarthCube

Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences

Converging on reference architecture semantics Analysis of existing building blocks, and their variability

Component

System

Function

Description

Interfaces

Implementation

Steward Organization

Availability

Reference

Developing cross-domain vocabularies, connecting domain models

Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences

Requirements Process

Workshop Summaries

Surveys

Architecture Designs

Analyze what worked

Incorporate social technologies

Inventory CI building blocks

Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences

Concerns Hitting the right level of granularity in the design

Identifying necessary communication channels

Account for all key perspectives

Fixing the scope and technologies

Balancing current and future requirements

Harmonizing technical and social subsystems and managing interactions between them

Uneven standardization and convergence across domains and functional components

Constructing a self-organizing plug-and-play system

Inventorying building blocks

Enterprise Architecture for Transformative Research and Collaboration Across the Geosciences

Summary System is defined by:

Specifications for interfaces and interchange formats (the gateways)

Definition of key functional components at an abstract level

Discovery, Workflow s, Data processing, annotation, documentation

Technology needs to support Communication between subsystems (people and

machines)

Collection of metrics required to assess what is working (selection of the fittest)

Assembly of components