Dati “open” per conoscere il clima. Ecco ESGF

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In un articolo pubblicato di recente sulla rivista Future Generation Computer System (tra gli autori, il ricercatore del CMCC Sandro Fiore), viene presentata e descritta la Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), un’infrastruttura open per l’accesso a dati geospaziali.
 ESGF è il frutto di una collaborazione internazionale interdisciplinare, volta allo sviluppo di un’infrastruttura software per facilitare e rafforzare lo studio dei cambiamenti climatici su scala globale. Entrando più nel dettaglio, ESGF comprende servizi per la ricerca, l’accesso, l’analisi e la visualizzazione dei dati, i risultati dei modelli, le osservazioni e i dati di rianalisi.
ESGF rappresenta pertanto un esempio riuscito d’integrazione di diverse tecnologie open source per la realizzazione di un sistema coerente con funzionalità più ampie.
 ESGF fornirà inoltre un supporto operativo all’archivio globale del progetto CMIP5 (Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project).

L’abstract dell’articolo
The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is a multi-agency, international collaboration that aims at developing the software infrastructure needed to facilitate and empower the study of climate change on a global scale. The ESGF’s architecture employs a system of geographically distributed peer nodes, which are independently administered yet united by the adoption of common federation protocols and application programming interfaces (APIs). The cornerstones of its interoperability are the peer-to-peer messaging that is continuously exchanged among all nodes in the federation; a shared architecture and API for search and discovery; and a security infrastructure based on industry standards (OpenID, SSL, GSI and SAML). The ESGF software stack integrates custom components (for data publishing, searching, user interface, security and messaging), developed collaboratively by the team, with popular application engines (Tomcat, Solr) available from the open source community. The full ESGF infrastructure has now been adopted by multiple Earth science projects and allows access to petabytes of geophysical data, including the entire Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) output used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and a suite of satellite observations (obs4MIPs) and reanalysis data sets (ANA4MIPs). This paper presents ESGF as a successful example of integration of disparate open source technologies into a cohesive, wide functional system, and describes our experience in building and operating a distributed and federated infrastructure to serve the needs of the global climate science community.

Leggi la versione integrale dell’articolo:
Cinquini L., Crichton D., Mattmann C., Harney J., Shipman G., Wang F., Ananthakrishnan R., Miller N., Denvil S., Morgan M., Pobre Z., Bell G. M. , Doutriaux C., Drach R, Williams D., Kershaw P., Pascoe S., Gonzalez E., Fiore S., Schweitzer R. (2014)
The Earth System Grid Federation: An open infrastructure for access to distributed geospatial data
Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume 36, July 2014, Pages 400-417, ISSN 0167-739X, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2013.07.002.

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