Open Support Platform for Environmental Research (OSPER)

OSPER is the phase II project of the Swiss Experiment Platform (SwissEx). The aim of OSPER is to form the existing data infrastructure of Swiss Experiment into a knowledge infrastructure capable of supporting all Swiss environmental research.

A primary focus of OSPER will be conformance to international data standards. The SwissEx infrastructure has so far focused on making an advanced data structure available to the research community. The focus of OSPER will now be to make this infrastructure interoperable with other infrastructures, such that more data is available to the user, or looked at another way, the advanced tools can be applied to more data sources.

Within the project, we will develop our data, metadata and visualisation platforms to support complex queries across both spatially distributed and point measurement data, including spatially distributed data with up to 4 dimensions. This will require not only changes to the data storage system, but also the implementation of new data visualisation techniques. 

The WebGIS data visualisation system currently available within SwissEx is already extremely advanced and could provide an interesting public service. Unfortunately, due to licensing of the maps within the system, this platform is currently restricted to the ETH domain. We will therefore build a second, public GIS system, using the same software (and with access to the same data), but using open sources of map data.

Using the WebGIS system, we can visualise a timeline of data from our Alpine3D model, overlayed on topographic information.

Any infrastructure will remain unused if it is not perceived to provide an advantage over the current practices of the user. Under OSPER, we will therefore work to integrate the system into the workflow of the user. A library of tools will be developed in several scientific desktop processing tool languages, which will enable the user to access data directly from the processing tools that they are using, without the additional effort of downloading and reformatting data. These tools will also incorporate statistical processing tools which can provide significant data mining capabilities, but are often overlooked by researchers.

Some of the research that our users do, does however generate a large amount of data or require significant processing power. Current cloud systems could be used by our users, but are often not used due to the integration effort required. We will develop demonstration systems of both cloud storage and cloud processing within the SwissEx system, which can be downloaded, adapted and uploaded to any OpenStack system for easy cloud integration of a researchers workflow.

By 2015, we hope to have a platform with world leading capabilities. For our full work plan, please visit the SwissEx website.

Images of the current SwissEx infrastructure:

Streaming data plots from the GSN data system

The data discovery interface of the metadata system

An experiment description within the metadata system

The GeoVite WebGIS data visualisation system