Technology

The various components of the GEON system are shown in the following diagram. You may click on each module to obtain more information about it.

Middleware Services

Modern IT architectures employ a “layered” approach to software, which provides a separation of concerns between one layer of software to the next, with the goal of achieving modularization and, therefore, extensibility in the software design and better maintainability of the software. The layers of software that reside between the resources—such as data, tools, and computing engines—and the end user are the different levels of “middleware” in such a system. 

The middleware in GEON includes the following functionality:

• Registration: GEON has implemented a novel 3-step system for data registration, which includes
• Metadata registration – ie providing the metadata for each data resources. We employ the ADN (Alexandria-DLESE-NASA) metadata schema for this, with the primary Dublin Core-like fields being required (along with spatial information), and the rest being optional.
• Schema registration – for structured data sources (e.g. shapefiles, relational databases, Excel spreadsheets, XML files, delimited ASCII files, netCDF), we are able to register the schema elements to ontologies, which enables end users and applications to employ a uniform way of querying resources even if they have heterogeneous schemas
• Data item registration –registration of individual data items in a data set to ontologies. This enables “semantic” integration of data, by the system knowing that seemingly different terms in different databases actually refer to the same semantic concept.

Data registration functionality is available in the Register portlet of the GEON Portal.

• Data Integration: Based on the schema and data-item registration scheme described above, GEON has introduced the concept of “Data Integration Carts™”, which can provide data integration across very heterogeneous resources.

Data Integration Carts™ are available under the “myIntegrated Resources” section of the myWorkbench portlet in the GEON Portal.

• Indexing: text indexing of some of the metadata fields is supported in GEON.  Users may use text-based search in the Search portlet. Currently, text-based search is applied to the Title, Abstract, and Subject Terms fields of the metadata.

• Workflow: GEON employs the Kepler workflow system to control some of the processing behind-the-scenes, e.g. processing of LiDAR point cloud data in the GLW application <<link to portal.geongrid.org/lidar>>

• Visualization and Mapping: on-the-fly mapping is supported in GEON as part of the Data Integration Cart™, in the myWorkbench portlet. A user may request a map service to be created for data in such a Cart. 

3D and 4D visualization of Earth Science data is supported via the GEON IDV tool. This tools can be downloaded from GEON. Go to the Search function and enter “GEON IDV” in the search box, the search will return information about the IDV tool. Click on the “Link to Content” button, which will take you to the GEON IDV page (hosted at UNAVCO) from which you can also download the software.
Stay tuned! We are currently working on a more full integration of IDV into the GEON Portal. For example, “IDV bundles” can be registered into GEON. Also, “View using IDV” will be one of the options when results are returned via GEON Search