GEON Node Deployed at AIST, Japan

The National Institue of Advanced and Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan deployed a GEON node during August and is planning to make MODIS and ASTER datasets available to the GEON community. Delegates of AIST attended the CSIG '05 and, subsequently, worked with GEON team members at SDSC to install the GEON stack at their location. AIST will deploy their own Certificate Authority (CA) and SDSC will ensure that Grid certificates can be exchanged between the AIST domain and the GEON domain.

GEON Portal Supports the Registration and Search of More Resource Types

The GEON software development team at San Diego Supercomputer Center released new modules for supporting more types of resources on the GEONgrid portal. The portal now supports the upload of new data formats such as GMT Raster and CUAHSI Arbitrary Data Objects along with the registration of scientific software tools and Web Services. These capabilities will bring more data and tools for analysis and visualization for the geosciences community on the portal. The next step in the development focuses on supporting more data formats and building new functionality for information integration using these new data formats. GEONgrid portal capabilities can be accessed from the URL: https://portal.geongrid.org:8443/gridsphere/gridsphere

GSA to publish Special Paper on GEOINFORMATICS

GEON researcher Krishna Sinha is the editor of a new Geological Society of America Special Paper GEOINFORMATICS. The volume, in press, represents the first collection of research papers from both geoscientists and information technology researchers defining the emerging field of Geoinformatics.
Contact Sinha at pitlab@vt.edu for more details.

Ontologic Data Registration Work Continues

During a week-long visit to SDSC in August, Krishna Sinha of Virginia Tech worked with Kai Lin to formalize data level ontology that is required for ontologic data registration. Progress was made during this dedicated time, and a release date is anticipated in October. More information on the status and direction of this work can be gained by contacting Sinha at pitlab@vt.edu.

Outreach:

A.K. Sinha (GEON PI, VA Tech) to give invited presentation on "GEON, Geological Data and Data Products" at the upcoming EarthScope in the Northern Rockies Workshop in Bozeman, MT, Sept 16-18th (abstract available at http://serc.carleton.edu/earthscoperockies/index.html)

GEON PIs Ann Gates (UTEP), Randy Keller (UTEP), and Chaitan Baru (SDSC) will present at a technical session entitled "Cyberinfrastructure, What Is It?" at the SACNAS (Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans) Annual Meeting in Denver (Sept 29-Oct 2, 2005) . The project will also host a booth (#447) at this meeting.

A paper entitled "Grid-Enabled Mediation Services for Geospatial Information" written by SDSC GEON team members I. Zaslavsky, C. Baru, K. Bhatia, A. Memon (along with P. Velikhov and V. Veytser) has been published in the book "Next Generation Geospatial Information from Digital Image Analysis to Spatiotemporal Databases" (ISBN: 0415380499). This paper references work done on a popular information integration strategy that relies on middleware component called the mediator for rewriting user queries against heterogeneous distributed data sources using the Grid Enabled Mediation Service being developed for the Cyberinfrastructure projects like GEON, BIRN, etc.