 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||||||||||
|
Site Flash 2000Peter McCartney, CAP Information ManagerResourcesThe Center for Environmental Studies acquired approximately 3000 square feet of space in January 2000. This entire building was given to the CES Information Management lab. The lab now has 12 lab workstations ranging from Pentium 200 to Pentium III 500. A new staff position of GIS technician was created and filled by Matthew Luck, a graduate student currently working with Professor Jingle Wu in landscape modeling. Matt works approximately 60% in the lab for me, and 40% at ASU West in an effort to better integrate data management with the modeling team. With funding of the BDI Project (see below) we hired two academic associates and one RA student. Corinna Gries is a coPi on the BDI grant and works on integrating the ASU environmental data resources. Steve Stevens was hired in July as the projects Senior programmer. Finally, McCartney received a tenure-track position as research scientist in which he will continue serving as the CAP IM as well as expand the Center's program in environmental data management. You can't ever make forward progress without some loss - ours was the sudden departure in June of the LTER system administrator and database specialist Steve Rosales. Applications are currently under review for Steve's position, but we have been struggling all summer to stay running! We expanded our server resources by adding a dedicated web server. We are also in the process of ordering two more servers. One will be used exclusively for internet map serving as these applications tend to be very unstable and CPU intensive. The other will be used to remove the burden of backup and domain administration from our main servers. We expanded our storage capacity by about 60 Gigabytes, and will be ordering another Raid Array shortly to accommodate expanding remote sensing and photograph archives. Activities and ProductsThe largest data management undertaking for CAP was the development of a comprehensive database to store data for the Survey 200 project. This is a 200 point sampling project to generate 5 year snapshots of the full spectrum of monitoring parameters for the CAP LTER project. The SQL Server database uses ESRI Spatial Database Engine (SDE) to store GIS data. The associated MS Access application supports automated import of data from GPS, Weather station software, and chemistry analysis machines. As CAP wraps up many of its pilot projects and prepares for its first mid-term review, we have begun the process of gathering data and metadata from PIs and RAs. We anticipate having metadata for virtually all completed projects in the data catalog and hope to have a significant number of datasets actually available for download by November. Enhancements are well underway to integrate spatial search, visualizaton and processing into the existing CAP Online Data Catalog. An application being demonstrated in the DM-5 Workshop uses Esri's MapObjects and Visual Basic to spawn an online map of spatial data from the CAP data catalog and present users with options to clip and/or reproject data prior to downloading it. In connection with these changes, we are expanding our use of ESRI spatial database engine as the storage medium for spatial data. SDE affords faster processing for server-based applications and mitigates the need for producing and storing multiple copies of spatial data in different clips and projections. Most of the posters from the second CAP LTER poster conference, held January 2000, were produced digitally using Adobe PDF as an intermediary print and archive format. These will go online on our web site soon. The Ecology Explorers educational website (http://caplter.asu.edu/explorers) was enhanced with data download scripts to help teachers and students select and download data from the shared database containing the data from students monitoring projects. With more supplemental funding, we began developing a Z39.50 search access to biological collections databases at ASU. This will provide a common search interface to these different data sources, as well as integrated them into a larger search network developed by the University of Kansas Natural History Museum. We continued our efforts to assist researchers in acquiring existing data relevant to CAP research. Data from LandisCorp, USGS, and various remote sensing sources were acquired and converted to formats and/or projections compatible for use in LTER Research. Our proposal to the NSF Biological Databases and Informatics program was funded in full. This is a 3 year project beginning in January 2000. This grant (described in more detail in the 1999 IM annual report) seeks to expand ASU's infrastructure for managing biological data by developing a series of tools for acquiring, processing and reporting metadata and then using them to build delivery solutions that interconnect the search, acquisition and application process associated with using archived data. Activities for the first year involved working with LTER metadata team and the NCEAS KDI project on metadata standards, establishment of a comprehensive taxonomic information database for ASU based on the ITIS model, and initial design specifications for the first of our application tools - an interactive wizard for creating metadata. McCartney was elected to the LTER Information Managers Executive Committee and continued to serve as panel reviewer for the NSF Postdoctoral Awards competition in Bioinformatics. McCartney continues to serve as a co-PI on a successful KDI project using 3 dimensional visualization in scientific applications. Although the project does not directly involve LTER, the CES Lab's involvement focuses heavily on XML and database development. DirectionsWith the award of BDI, the Information Management Lab at the Center has been able to establish an identity and staff beyond the scope of the LTER project, allowing us to leverage our resources and integrate LTER data with the broader ASU community and beyond. A recently awarded IGERT proposal included plans for developing a role for the lab within that program as a central resource for IT support and training, so we are looking forward to seeing those plans develop over the next year. For CAPLTER, our immediate challenge is preparing for our review. This will involve an effort during September and October to get pilot project metadata into the online catalog. |
||
|
Contact CAP LTER | Webmaster Page updated January 22, 2001 by CDZ |
||
|
Central
Arizona - Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research |
||