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FINDING A COMMON DATA REPRESENTATION AND INTERCHANGE APPROACH FOR MULTIMEDIA MODELS
Citation:
Fine, S. FINDING A COMMON DATA REPRESENTATION AND INTERCHANGE APPROACH FOR MULTIMEDIA MODELS. Presented at Second Federal Interagency Hydrologic Modeling Conference, Las Vegas, NV, July 28-August 1, 2002.
Impact/Purpose:
This task has the following objectives:
Improve modelers' ability to focus on scientific and policy issues in modeling studies by providing software that supports composing, applying, and evaluating complex systems of models.
Improve the understanding of the interaction of the atmosphere and the underlying surface, especially the flux of mass in both directions, and EPA's ability to simulate that interaction.
Contribute to multimedia studies and assessments by applying state-of-the-art atmospheric models, estimating atmospheric contributions to multimedia issues and the sources of those contributions, and evaluating the models' strengths and weaknesses.
Description:
Within many disciplines, multiple approaches are used to represent and access very similar data (e.g., a time series of values), often due to the lack of commonly accepted standards. When projects must use data from multiple disciplines, the problems quickly compound. Often significant effort is expended reformatting data, tracking down what data represent, and debugging problems caused by mistakes and misunderstandings. To try to address this issue, multiple federal agencies are exploring general approaches that can be used to represent, access, and exchange environmental data. This includes identifying common data structures, software to read and write the data, standards for clearly describing what data represent (metadata), and tools to resolve differences between available data and data needs, all in a manner that supports great flexibility in applications (e.g., change the source of data from a local file to a web site or a database without editing code) and a form that modelers could use. If a more general approach for working with environmental data is found, modelers should be able to easily bring together new combinations of models, data analysis tools, and data sets without changing code or reformatting data. Several existing packages provide at least a partial solution to these requirements, including the Distributed Oceanographic Data System, the Synthetic Environment Data Representation and Interchange Specification, and the Hierarchical Data Format.
The participating Federal agencies will be identifying requirements for a general approach, surveying available off-the-shelf packages, and developing test applications to identify the approaches that come closest to addressing the requirements. If a full solution is not found, then extension of off-the-shelf tools will be developed. This paper reports on this ongoing investigation.