Professional Documents
Culture Documents
qualities &
responsibilities of a
geographical
cyberinfrastructure
Mark Gahegan
Centre for eResearch &
Computer Science
University of Auckland
Overview
1. Data-intensive GIScience: from data poor to
drowning in 40 years
2. Challenges of organizing Big Data for GIScience
3. Challenges of computing with Big Data for
GIScience
Data poor to drowning
the case of remote sensing
Early remote sensing
platform
1980s: 30m x 30m pixels
2000s: 2.5 m x 2.5m pixels
Airborne Sensor platform
(much cheaper and more flexible than satellite)
One of the latest unmanned remote
sensing platforms
How much data so far?
• NASA’s Earth Observation System (EOS) program has
about 4.2 petabytes (2010)
– 430 times larger than the DT-LoC
– 3 times smaller than the output from the Large Hadron
Collider in a single year
• Similar sized collections can be expected in Europe
and Asia
• EOS contains mostly satellite data…not air photos,
map or field data
• What about ‘Volunteered’ data?
• And “The long tail of dark data…”?
How does that
compare to other
science disciplines?
• Large Hadron Collider
(Physics)
– 10-14TB year
– A 20km high stack of DVDs or
400,000 large PC disks
• Genomics (Biology)
– Imaging sequencers: Data
volume doubling every 6
months
– Can’t back it up to tape fast
enough
Big Data Challenges for CI
1. Storing unprecedented volumes of data (and accelerating)
– Data production passed storage capacity in 2007
– Cost differential is increasing, Rate of data production is increasing
Utility
Cost of reengineering
Sticky CyberGIS
How to attract and keep the community
involved?
– Outreach & community engagement
– Compelling and appealing functionality
• Data and method repositories
• Workflows
• Semantic interoperability
• Killer Apps…
– Incentives to contribute
– Continuity
Computational
workflows embedded in
social media
,
• Scripts, workflows,
simulations, experimental
plans statistical models, ...
• Repeatable, reproducible,
comparable and reusable
• Sharing propagates
expertise and builds
reputation
• One can be ‘friends with
an experiment’ in a
science, social network
http://myexperiment.org
Semantically translating map data
SemDat Web Service:
http://semdat.bestgrid.org/semdat/
Killer App example from geosciences:
earthquake modelling
Seismicity (ANSS) Paleoseismology Local site effects Geologic structure (USArray)
Faults
(USArray)
Seismic Rupture
Hazard dynamics
Model (SAFOD,
ANSS,
InSAR Image of the
Hector Mine Earthquake USArray)
A satellite
Stress generated
Interferometric
Synthetic Radar
(from Leinen, 2004) Crustal motion (PBO) Crustal deformation (InSAR) Seismic velocity (USArray)
GEON: Chaitan Baru, SDSC
Conclusions
• Big Data creates new ways of approaching GIScience: discovery-led
rather than theory-led
– Need to scale up our storage
– Useful data is the data that can be reused…
• Scalable GIScience methods are needed now
– Domain decomposition has always been the challenge for GIScience,
and is still.
– A systematic analysis of algorithm bottlenecks and amenability to
parallelization has been missing for 20 years
– Such an analysis is an ongoing task…as new parallel HPC and data
paradigms become possible
– Re-educate to reset expectations among researchers
• Use the best technologies and tools from other disciplines who
have made this leap, especially bio-informatics, computational
chemistry, high energy physics
Questions?
Fourth paradigm and data complexity
1. Experiment & Measurement
2. Analytical Theory
3. Numerical Simulations
4. Data Intensive Computing
Data fusion + data mining + synthesis/learning + explanation
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/
Utilizing massive data to discover
and explain
Is not as easy as you might think…
– Poor and sparse samples, surrogates, bias…
– As number of dimensions increases it becomes
increasingly difficult to add in any data point
without giving rise to some kind of statistically
significant ‘pattern’ or ‘cluster’
– And parametric distributions become unreliable
– It is very difficult to discover useful things that are
unknown by experts
We need to capture the meaning of
data, not just the data itself
aligning heterogeneous definitions in content, schema
Era
GEOLOGIC AGE ROCK TYPE
Eon Volcanic