Hawaii Geospatial Data Repository

Currently, scientific data at the University of Hawai‘i, and to a larger degree statewide, is managed with varying levels of rigor and access throughout each lab and among individual researchers. The Hawai‘i Geospatial Data Repository (HGDR) is a massive data repository that will be professionally managed and backed up to ensure the safekeeping of scientific datasets. The HGDR will allow responsible access from EPSCoR IMUA III researchers and collaborators from around the state and the world. It will support complementary research programs in Hawai‘i as well as access to data by students at K-­‐12, community college and university levels in support of STEM initiatives and workforce development. The HGDR project goals are to establish an integrative capability to collect, store and manage access to data in support of discovery, manipulation, fusion and visualization, beginning with the geospatial information that is central to the proposed research of IMUA III. Building on this foundation, the Hawaii Geospatial Data Repository will work towards integrating the disparate research datasets managed throughout Hawaii using a variety of formats and further develop the approach of using portals to customize access and viewing, as well as facilitate connections to High Performance Computing for modeling, analysis and visualization.

The HGDR includes server and storage resources at both the Manoa (Keller Hall) and Hilo campuses. In Hilo, this is part of the Spatial Data Analysis Labs infrastructure. Several web mapping and database services for the ENDER and ECOGEM teams have been completed or are running in development and testing mode. The basic infrastructure for the repository is in place in both locations and pilot web portal projects are being deployed. Year 2 upgrades to these systems will further expand the data serving and storage capacity of the infrastructure. These purchases have been completed and as the infrastructure arrives this fall it will be integrated into the existing infrastructure.
Some of the activities that have been completed include the following milestones and completed projects:

• ArcGIS Server, ArcSDE and SQL Server have been successfully deployed to serve web mapping applications and to warehouse statewide geospatial and scientific datasets. The database system allows password protected read/write access for researchers to deploy and share their own geospatial research datasets.
  
• The new Rainfall Atlas of Hawaii is currently served from the Hawaii Geospatial Data Repository and includes a portal interface and interactive web mapping application to allow users point and click access and query ability to rainfall datasets for the Hawaiian Islands. This pilot project was a success in enabling the Rainfall researchers the ability to manage and access their own grid datasets on the HGDR servers. HGDR technicians set up the data management access, developed the mapping interface and CMS portal environment.
  
• Statewide geospatial datasets have been loaded onto the Hawaii Geospatial Data Repository
  
• In collaboration with the USGS, 10 terabytes of new WorldView-2 satellite imagery have been loaded onto the HGDR
  
• Development continues on several EPSCoR applications with efforts by the Cyber team to assist researchers in utilizing appropriate data standards, models and metadata.
  

This fall 2011, technicians will be engaged in infrastructure upgrades to the Hawaii Geospatial Data Repository infrastructure in both Hilo and Manoa locations. These upgrades will serve to enhance the deployment of portal projects and to build linkages to HPC capabilities for modeling and analysis.

One of the initial pilot projects being tested is a QA/QC collaboration with the ENDER team to integrate weather station datasets into the repository and automate error checking and data gap recognition. This system will serve as a model for additional weather station deployments associated with the EPSCoR IMUA III project.