We are pleased to announce participation in a number of events at the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS). Dr. Zac Flamig, a postdoc at the Center for Data Intensive Science at the University of Chicago and scientific lead for the OCC NOAA Big Data Project, will be on-hand.
Highlights include:
As part of the scientific program at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, Zac Flamig, a postdoc at the Center for Data Intensive Science at the University of Chicago and scientific lead for the OCC NOAA Big Data Project, will present on "The OCC NOAA Data Commons: First Year Experiences."
This invited talk will take place Tuesday afternoon in the "Enabling Cloud Applications for Earth Science Data II session.” This session features 8 total speakers discussing how cloud computing is being used to enable science. AGU’s Fall Meeting boasts being the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world with more than 24,000 attendees in 2015. This talk provides a vital opportunity for OCC to share what it is working on within the NOAA Big Data Project as well as receive feedback on future directions.
We're pleased to announce our presence at the annual Super Computing conference. This year's conference will be in Salt Lake City, Utah and the OCC and the Center for Data Intensive Science will showcase:
- innovations in data science applications in biology, medicine, health care, and the environment;
- new releases of data commons and data peering technology that support research communities, including specialized commons for cancer genomic data, weather data, and satellite imagery;
- data intensive computing systems;
- high performance analytics;
- and a Tuesday Birds-of-a-Feather session on Data Commons led by Dr. Robert Grossman, Dr. Allison Heath, and Dr. Zachary Flamig.
If you're in Salt Lake City and attending the conference please stop by booth #2611, ask for a demonstration, and learn more about how we've been making data intensive research easier and more accessible. We'll be giving away free gourmet coffee, CDIS and OCC tool kits, and OSDC embossed Belgian chocolates. Get yours while they last!
While you're in the booth be sure to check out some of the innovative networking demonstrations of our booth partners: Naval Research Lab and the NASA Sciences and Exploration Directorate. These are organized by OCC Board Member Joe Mambretti and his organization, ICAIR, who is leading 42(!!) high speed networking demonstrations this year. The OCC and CDIS will participate in 100Gbps demonstrations showcasing transfer and use of NOAA environmental data and components of Software Defined Networking for Bioinformatics applications.
Scheduled highlights of the CDIS/OCC presence can be downloaded here. Unless otherwise noted, scheduled presentations will take place in exhibition booth #2611.
We’re pleased to announce that the Unversity of Illinois is now a member of the Open Commons Consortium!
The OCC and the the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) are working together on a data peering pilot that will make environmental data available across multiple commons. The pilot will peer resources in both the Open Science Data Cloud environmental data commons and the Resourcing Open Geospatial Education and Research (ROGER) supercomputer.
"Data peering will enable data commons service providers to share large datasets using persistent digital IDs over high speed research networks, effectively expanding the amount and quality of data transparently accessible to researchers associated with each service provider. We think of it as a kind of instantaneous inter-library loan system for complex data," said Dr. Robert Grossman, Director of the OCC. "It is very exciting to collaborate with NCSA as founding partners in this effort.”
"We're looking forward to working with NCSA, particularly on data peering. Data peering between NCSA and existing OCC resources will go a long way towards enabling sustainable access to large valuable datasets for more researchers and extending resources like the Environmental Data Commons," says Dr. Zac Flamig, of the Center for Data Intensive Science at the University of Chicago, and Scientific Lead for the OCC NOAA Working Group.
Learn more about how your organization can become a member of the OCC here.
We are very pleased to announce that the Molecular Evidence Development Consortium (MED-C) and the OCC have signed a memorandum of understanding to create the MED-C Biomedical Data Commons (BDC), which will allow the sharing of genetic and clinical data in a unified manner. Within a few years, the MED-C BDC is expected to be one of the largest genomic data commons, a key step toward the next stage of personalized medicine.
“We are very pleased to be collaborating with MED-C to build this initiative. Not only will the MED-C BDC be one of the largest genomic data commons, but it will share a common architecture and interfaces with other OCC projects so that researchers will have transparent access to a critical mass of genomic and associated clinical and outcome data,” says Dr. Robert Grossman, director of the OCC.
Read the full press release here.
Dr. Grossman appeared on the Chicago Tonight program on WTTW PBS to discuss the Genomic Data Commons (GDC) effort at the Center for Data Intensive Science (CDIS) @ University of Chicago.
The OCC NOAA Data Alliance Working Group is seeking feedback to help prioritize which datasets will provide maximum impact. Please take a few moments and fill out the survey below (or here) and tell us more about how you use Environmental datasets and your data needs.
Survey results will help us determine which datasets and services have the potential for the greatest impact in the OCC Environmental Commons ecosystem.
NOAA NEXRAD L2 data is now available in the OCC Environmental Data Commons as part of the NOAA Big Data Project.
The NEXRAD dataset is ID'd by the Signpost digital ID system. Signpost balances the needs of both data archiving for persistent storage, that is, assigning identifiers to unique pieces of information, and also active computation, that is, for finding locations of data on a living system where data may be physically moved or updated. OCC Members constructed a simple implementation of this design in a two-layer identification scheme service with a REST-like API interface. By utilizing the Signpost digital identifier service, we can relocate data files from our data commons to another commons and no researcher needs to change their code.
We have also made public a sample analysis of NEXRAD L2 data that uses Signpost, Jupyter Notebook, and the Py-ART python package. The analysis creates an animated visualization of a mayfly event available as a public snapshot image for OSDC Griffin allocation grantees, or for non grantees via github or github.io.
If you have any questions or comments, please contact noaa dot crada at occ-data.org.
Dr. Maria Patterson, Scientific Lead for the OSDC is a guest speaker at the ACM Chicago meetup on Wed, June 8th. Her lecture on 'Big Data vs the Scientist' will touch on her work with the OCC to build and maintain data commons, and her many contributions to OCC working groups like Project Matsu and the NOAA Big Data Project. RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/acm-chicago/
If you're in town for the Center For Data Intensive Science (CDIS) sponsored Data Commons Workshop Series be sure to RSVP for this meet-up.
On June 9th, OCC partner the Center For Data Intensive Science (CDIS) will be hosting a full day workshop on Environmental Data Commons in Chicago, IL as part of their Data Commons Data Sharing workshop series.
There will be sessions on environmental commons, services for environmental commons, environmental data commons applications, the OCC-NOAA Big Data Alliance, and interoperability of environmental commons, clouds, and repositories.
To register and for more information including workshop location, agenda, and options for lodging, please visit: https://sites.google.com/site/environmentalcommons/
