IGARSS 2010 - 2010 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium - July 25 - 30, 2010 - Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Emerging Challenges with Managing CRS Data

Arcot (Raja) Rajasekar

Introduction. Community Remote Sensing (CRS) is an emerging field where information is collected about the environment by the general public and then integrated into collections to provide a holistic view of the environment with local details. Citizen scientists may use sophisticated sensors and tools to collect increasingly precise information about our environment. Such holistic views can serve as ground-truthing for information collected by traditional sources such as satellites and deployed sensor systems. With social networking tools and crowd sourcing technologies, the data collected by the CRS systems can grow exponentially. One of the challenges of the CRS community is the problem of how to manage such data in a coherent manner such that it can enable new science and aid decision making. The CRS system should deploy a cyber-infrastructure, CRS-CI, that is scalable and can support organic growth to meet the needs of an expanding CRS community. Several challenges need to be addressed by CRS-CI. We look at these challenges and set forth a set of six guiding principles for a solution.

CRS-CI Challenges. Community-driven data collection can produce large amounts of environmental data (such as rainfall, temperature, humidity, water shed level, crop yields, etc.) including sensor-based point measurements, textual data capturing information in free form, photographic images and video. We expect these data to be distributed geo-spatially and contain metadata about the data collector, time information, and other contextual information that provide additional attributes about the collection process. We expect that in the near future, such collections will total 100s of Gigabytes to Terabytes in size with millions of files. The CRS-CI needs to provide a viable data management framework that enables 1) ingesting, 2) organizing, 3) storing, 4) discovery and access, 5) analysis, and 6) long term preservation.

Since the data being collected are nation-wide (and possibly global-wide) one needs a distributed data collection environment. This is necessary not just for fault-tolerance and disaster-recovery but also to give the users (both data gatherers and data users) fast access to the system resources. Since the CRS community will be interested in collections of data for different disciplines (not just climate-related but also data for hydrology, plant biology, ornithology, etc), it may be necessary to have different instances of the cyber-infrastructure running for each of these sub-communities. One of the goals may be to provide easy federation of these diverse data collections to support inter-disciplinary research.

Since these data are being gathered by citizen scientists, it would be helpful and a motivating driver if they can see how their results are used in analysis and forecasting. The CRS-CI should provide tools that the citizen scientists can use to analyze their own data (along with others) and also tools for visualizing the data. Another important capability in the CRS-CI tool kit would be scientific workflow tools (such as Kepler) that can be used by data gatherers and users to analyze their data by chaining multiple analytical components and feeding them to appropriate visualization engines. Such workflows can be used for analysis of gathered data in real-time, can be run continually, and can be used for comparing current results with archived data. The analysis tools can also be used for fusing data of multiple types (say rainfall measurement along a river, and river depth measurements) to show a composite view of an emerging disaster in a flood plain. Integrating data gathered by CRS with data from deployed sensor networks (by governmental agencies and research units) will also provide a more complete picture of the environment. Enabling such analysis and synthesis should be possible under the CRS-CI.

Important criteria for CRS-CI are validation and error-correction of CRS collected data. Metrics and processes for data quality assessments, correlation of data for validation purposes, and cross-checking with inter-disciplinary data will be of importance to document the usefulness of the results that can be inferred from the data gathered under CRS. Tools for performing such validation should be automatically applied on data ingestion. Moreover, the concept of validation-before-publication should be a policy that is advocated in CRS-CI, along with automated discipline-centric triage.

Since the data collected by CRS are of multiple types, they may need to be stored in heterogeneous systems from relational databases to file systems. Organizing this data is extremely important. Indeed as new data come in from different user bases, organizing the data into coherent groups will be harder but very much needed. Self-organizing data collections are needed, such that the characteristics of the data being ingested will “place” the data into the appropriate CRS-CI data organization. Policies for how data gets self-organized in such a diverse data space is a research topic that needs to be addressed. Similarly, the identification of relationships between data sets is also important and needs to be captured to help in analyzing the data in a meaningful manner. These relationships (similar to functional relationships between tables in relational data bases) need to be codified for usage.

Standardization also plays an important role in CRS-CI. Since data are being gathered by multiple persons, the vocabulary used for describing the data and the data units can lead to incompatibilities. Hence, one needs to ensure that self-consistent ontologies and reserved key words are used when ingesting data into the CRS-CI. This may require automatic form generation mechanisms. Also, the data values need to be converted to a standard set of units. Hence if the CRS-CI is standardized to ingest temperature data in Celsius units, then all temperatures need to be converted to this unit before storage and publication. Similarly date and time formats need to be standardized to minimize confusion and error.

CRS-CI Solution. The CRS system needs to be based on a cyber infrastructure that is robust and extensible and that can meet the multiple challenges posed by the diverse data gathering and usage models. We propose a system that uses the following six principles as an ideal system that meets these challenges.

Scalable Federated Data Grid Architecture. Data Grids provide access to large collections of data whose sizes are measured in petabytes and hundreds of millions of files. A data grid provides access to geographically distributed heterogeneous data resources assembled from file systems, tape archives, relational databases, semi-structured data systems, video streaming systems, and sensor data streams. They support operations for sharing data across inter and intra-disciplinary groups without having to aggregate the data into a centralized data warehouse. Data grids provide a virtualized interface to applications, hiding the idiosyncrasies of the underlying infrastructure from users and applications. The data grids also provide a means for long-term preservation by implementing technology transparency. Federation of data grids allows for independent data grids to interact with each other based on trusted relationships and allow users from one data grid to access data from another data grid.

Semantics-enabled Discovery and Access. Data without metadata that defines the context are worthless for automatic sharing (for example try imagining the web without any search engines). Associating metadata to describe the content and context of the data provides a means of discovering relevant data for users and applications. Free form descriptions are one type of metadata that can be textually indexed and used for discovery (as done in the web). With scientific data a more robust semantic indexing is needed. This can be in the form of keyword-value-unit triplets that can define the properties of data (e.g. Measurement = temperature in Celsius) and describe the content and context of the data. Search on the metadata supports discovery of desired files in a collection. One can also associate structured metadata (relational) and semi-structured metadata (XML and RDF) to capture a more complex context. Querying across multiple types of metadata and joining the results is still a research problem.

Policy-based Data Organization and Management. The CRS-CI system will cater to a wide-variety of data (both in discipline, context, format, gathering and usage) and the management and organization of this heterogeneity will bring its own challenges. One way to lessen the burden is to automate as much of the organization of the data collection and management of the data system as possible. Organization of data may need to be done on demand and through self-organizing management policies. Similarly administrative management of the system can be based on defined policies for retention, disposition, distribution, replication, and synchronization. The self-organizing policies and management policies can be captured as computer actionable rules and executed on demand. These rules will be akin to ECA-rules of active databases so that when an event occurs, the condition gets checked and appropriate rules are fired to perform the necessary actions. Capturing data organization policies and data system management policies in a CRS system will be a research problem that needs to be addressed. Our experience with the iRODS integrated Rule Oriented Data System shows that this is feasible.

User-friendly Workflow Systems for Analysis and Synthesis. The data collected in a CRS system will be used in multiple ways – in near real time for analysis and forecasting, in delayed analysis for modeling, and in data mining for specific events. The CRS-CI should provide facilities for including services and tools for performing modeling, analysis, synthesis and data mining. The CRS-CI by itself may not have all tools in its core part, but should support plug and play mechanisms.

Virtualization and Standardization of all Aspects of the CI. Standards for the CRS-CI system data collections are necessary for making it easier for discovery, organization and management. These can be captured as policies coded as ECA-type rules. Virtualization hides the intricacies of the CRS-CI from the users. Also by virtualizing the tools, users are not tied to physical characteristics of the data collection.

Social Consensus on Collection Properties. Community specific collections will emerge that attract different sets of citizen scientists. The CRS-CI system will need to support the evolution of management policies and procedures for each new community. This corresponds to a social consensus on the appraisal criteria for admitting data into the collection, the logical arrangement of the data, the semantics for describing the data, and the set of services that are supported for manipulating the data.

Raja Rajasekar is a Professor in the School of Information and Library Sciences at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He can be reached at rajaseka@email.unc.edu


©2017 Conference Management Services, Inc. -||- email: webmaster@igarss2010.org -||- Last updated Monday, February 01, 2010