KITWARE INC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 01c

Description

Current and future research in biological and environmental (BER) domains require data ingestion of various kinds for result generation and model validation. This poses significant challenges to existing data management technologies which lack stability, evolving nature, diversity, and implicit scientific context that characterize environmental and bio- logical data. One such challenge is linking data together across interdisciplinary sciences in meaningful ways so that data can more readily lead to new insights and conclusions. Also, as datasets grow increasingly large in scale, data processing needs to scale and bring algorithms and tools close to the data for performance and cost-effectiveness. Finally, easy access to scientific data distributed across various interdisciplinary domains and locations, sharing, and collaboration are crucial to productive research performed by geographically and technically diverse research teams. To address these challenges and to support data-driven analysis, sharing, and collaboration, Kitware, and its collaborators will develop an integrated open-source scientific data management system (Apache V2 license), ResonantEco, that meets the need of biological and environmental researchers for data management, curation, analysis, and processing over a wide range of scale and complexity. In Phase I, we will focus on proto- typing building blocks for data ingestion, unified data interface, integration, and catalog generation. In Phase II, we will develop support for distributed data prepossessing operations and provenance, and enabling deeper integration with existing tools. ResonantEco will provide web-enabled data services, unified data interfaces and federated views of data and metadata for heterogeneous data sources with an interactive web client for data exploration. Our design and approach to data management will ensure that the system is widely applicable to other domains such as pharmaceutical, precision- agriculture, weather and climate, basic energy sciences, and other areas of modeling and simulation research. ResonantEco will use the Kitware developed open source data management tool Girder with other proven open source tools for distributed and parallel data processing on the cloud or HPC. The software will leverage Kitware’s successful open source model, based on customization and consulting.