GABBs: Geospatial Extensions for HUBzero Science Gateways

The HUBzero cyberinfrastructure framework has been used to build science gateways for various domains ranging from nanotechnology and biomedical sciences to high performance computing and engineering education to name a few. Several HUBzero-based science gateways also work with geospatial data in the context of environmental modeling, drought prediction, and the effects of climate change on agriculture. While these diverse research fields may work with varied geospatial data content and formats, they share common needs of managing, visualizing and processing the data. Geospatial data utilizes highly structured file formats, often including metadata that is conducive to automatic extraction and subsequent search. Similarly, irrespective of the actual file format employed, geospatial data at its core includes uniformly visualizable features. Developed in response to these common needs, Geospatial Data Analysis Building Blocks (GABBs) add these capabilities to the HUBzero software framework, enabling their availability out of the box for science gateways working with geospatial data. GABBs is integrated into the HUBzero framework, extending standard file management with iData, a value-added file management system that provides automated metadata extraction and geospatial preview support; various tools for visualizing and processing geospatial data; software and hardware visualization building blocks that simplify building new visualization tools with standard map elements; and finally a service API to iData, enabling remote data transfer from field devices and third party software. GABBs simplifies research workflows via a seamless interface between data and tools on HUBzero science gateways, with iData functioning as a uniform file management interface for data ingested remotely via the service API, uploaded manually via a web interface or simulation output saved from tools. GABBs-enabled HUBzero gateways are available out of the box, and individual GABBs capabilities can be added to any HUBzero science gateway. The publicly accessible MyGeoHub gateway is the central demonstration platform for all GABBs capabilities; a GABBs-enabled HUBzero gateway can be deployed to Amazon Web Services (AWS) completely automatically, in under an hour; and open-source Linux packages can be used to add individual GABBs components to any existing HUBzero gateway. Our poster will depict these various GABBs software building blocks and typical research workflows that they enable and simplify. It will also depict the various ways in which interested users can access or deploy a GABBs-enabled science gateway.