OceanLife - a system for integrating diverse marine biogeographical data
Technology: Spatiotemporal data integration

PROJECT TEAM (PI’s, co-PI’s, institutions)

Peter Arzberger, UC San Diego (PI)
Amarnath Gupta, UC San Diego (co-PI)
Karen Stocks, UC San Diego (co-PI)
Tim Kratz, U. Wisconsin (co_PI)

SDSC LEAD PARTICIPANTS AND THEIR EMAILS

Karen Stocks (kstocks@sdsc.edu)
Amarnath Gupta (gupta@sdsc.edu)

AREA OF PROJECT (e.g. bio, geo, chem., etc.)

Life Sciences, Environmental Science, Ecology, Ocean Sciences

WHAT SCIENTIFIC OR ENGINEERING PROBLEM DOES THE PROJECT ADDRESS (description of problem or scientific/engineering question for a lay audience)

The project is addressing two challenges.  The scientific challenge in the domain of marine biogeography and biodiversity is to develop system that meaningfully integrates biological and physical information as diverse as satellite images of sea surface color, mathematical models of the ocean's movements, and information about the kinds of species collected from different locations. The technical challenge is to develop a data integration system that treats spatial information and hierarchical ontologies as first-class data objects; this enables the mediator to  register to construct a global schema over spatial and ontological data sources, plan and execute distributed queries against such sources, and in the process, manipulate spatial and tree/DAG-structured data within the mediator.

HOW IS SDSC PARTICIPATING (expertise, data resources, compute resources, viz, etc.)

SDSC is developing both the data integration techniques for the spatially and ontologically extended mediator. It is also creating a web-based application for accessing the mediator. Further, much of the domain expertise for creating a meaningful application is being shepherded by SDSC.

URL FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROJECT

http://www.moore.org/grantees/grant_summaries_content.asp?Grantee=ucsd

POTENTIAL BIG IMPACT OF PROJECT 

The oceans are the lungs of our planet, and the source of 25% of the world's protein.  The OceanLife project will build a new portal for the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, the largest international federation of data on the distributions of species in the oceans, to give researchers access to information they need to better understand and manage living marine resources.

ANYTHING YOU WANT TO ADD THAT WOULD BE INTERESTING ABOUT THE PROJECT

The same information system will also serve as the basis of CAMERA, the large metagenomics project.