[seek] For NSF report

David Stockwell davids at sdsc.edu
Thu May 22 16:09:45 PDT 2003


Matt, Bertram, here is a report on SEEK activities as requested. 
Suggestions welcome as always.  Cheers



      Summary of the SEEK project activities led by David Stockwell at
      (SDSC)

1-Sep-2002 to May-2003.


      Meetings

David Stockwell participated in major meetings held at New Mexico (20-24 
Feb 2003) and San Diego (10-16 May 2003) and in ad-hoc weekly meetings 
held at San Diego.


      Personnell

Two programmers were hired during the period. The primary role has been 
to develop and modify parts of a prototype species mapping application 
called WhyWhere (WW) to provide a more mature application and serve as 
the basis for exploring issues related to provision of analysis services 
via the EcoGrid. Work performed was:

   1. Valentina Kouznetsova - 5months at 25% time now finished.
      Valentina modified image processing libraries to eliminate
      unnecessary image format conversions, eliminating a Perl library
      and converting the central routines from Perl into C code.  She
      has also extracted the central clustering algorithm from the
      libraries into stand-alone C code, allowing most of the
      computationally intensive prediction routines in WhyWhere to be
      implemented in C.
   2. Yang Yu - Graduate Research Assistant from March to present at
      25-50% time. Yang initially converted a number of large
      hydrological datasets into pgm format for incorporation into the
      WW modeling system.  Yang has modified image processing libraries
      for preparation of environmental data layers for modeling in the
      WW system, greatly increasing the speed. He has also developed
      some prototype applications to evaluate the speed of a possible
      visualization tool for large environmental data sets.


      Future Work. 

The main area we will pursue for SEEK is the exploration, development 
and incorporation of Geographic Information System (GIS) based data, 
services and protocols into the EcoGrid via the implementation of a 
number of applications as services using the OGC standard.  This work 
will provide a basis for future enhancements using rnowledge 
representation approaches from SEEK groups KR and SMS as they become 
available.  The goals of our work in the next period will be:

   1. To develop a generic Web Mapping Service (WMS) compliant with
      appropriate OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) specifications.
   2. Consolidate the work done on WW and incorporate the WMS developed
      above into WW operation.
   3. Develop a visualization service for the large environmental data
      sets used in WW.
   4. Develop a WSDL definition of the OGC services for incorporation of
      the WMS into METACAT or SRB


      Papers During Period

David Stockwell, A. Townsend Peterson (in press) Comparison of 
resolution of methods used in mapping biodiversity patterns from 
point-occurrence data. Ecological Indicators.

David R.B. Stockwell, James H. Beach, Aimee Stewart, Gregory Vorontsov, 
David Vieglais, Ricardo Scachetti Pereira. (in review) Lifemapper - an 
Internet computing application for biodiversity science. Ecological 
Modelling.

David Stockwell, Oliver Ryder, and Philippe Youkharibach. (in review) 
Informatics Issues in Integrated Biodiversity Resource Archives: 
problems and solutions, Environmental Informatics
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinformatics/pipermail/seek/attachments/20030522/92facabd/attachment.htm
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: report.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 23552 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinformatics/pipermail/seek/attachments/20030522/92facabd/report.doc


More information about the Seek mailing list