2017 ESIP Summer Meeting

Science gateways are user environments and science-centric middleware that broaden and deepen access to scientific computing, data, and other resources to support scientific research. Science gateways enable users to more easily use scientific applications on diverse high performance and cloud computing resources, to discover and analyze data, to reproduce computational experiments, and to share and discuss tools and results with colleagues.
Many successful science gateways have been built, but there have also been many failures, and even successful gateways must find ways to sustain themselves. To solve these problems, the National Science Foundation has funded the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) as one of its two initial software sustainability institutes. The SGCI’s mission is to increase the number of successful science gateways, and to help those gateways sustain and grow their user communities. To accomplish this mission, the SGCI provides services for science gateway developers. Services include incubation support, which helps gateway developers to develop a business startup mentality towards their projects; extended developer support, which provides projects with embedded technical assistance; the scientific software collaborative, which enables the community to publish and find software that can be used for building gateways; community engagement and exchange, which helps build the overall science gateway community; and workforce development, which helps increase the pipeline of student science gateway developers.
The goal of this session will be to increase the awareness of the potential for science gateways in the ESIP community. The session will feature a presentations on current earth science gateways, a presentation on earth science and general purpose science gateway technologies that can be used as science gateway platforms, a presentation on NSF-funded SGCI services that can be used to develop gateways, and a discussion of the general and specific requirements of the earth science community.

Metadata creation and curation is often confusing for those outside of the digital repository community. Many data providers wish to provide accurate and helpful information for metadata but are often overwhelmed by the various metadata standards and the jargon associated with many metadata concepts. This session explores ways to lower these barriers to metadata creation and curation.