Reference
Materials
These pages
contain brief descriptions of materials both at our site and at others
which might be considered "citations". We hope you find these materials
informative and interesting.
THE
ANGUS FILES | BROCHURES | DATASHEETS
GLOSSARY | POSTER | Q
& A | PRESENTATIONS | PRESS
RESEARCH | VIDEO | WHITEPAPERS
- Read The
Angus Files prepared by Dr. Angus MacDonald. He provides some old-world
insight into the world of computers as defined by a non-computer person.
- Science
Tools presents Scientist with the
honored Angus Award.
Questions and Answers
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Product
Specific Question and Answers
Many
of these Qs & As have been taken directly from some Request
For Information (RFI) and or Request For Proposal (RFP) papers we
have prepared for potential clients. Since the original RFI responses
and additional answers are public, we are not at liberty to disclose
certain proprietary information in our reply. We will be pleased
to further clarify and demonstrate our technological capabilities
in a setting where the information will not be disclosed.
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- A
Glossary of Terms
- A
Poster on the "Computational Unification of Science"
VHS
Version available upon request
THE FOLLOWING
SECTION CONTAINS HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS
The
Alternative Architecture Study
This seminal
white-paper, authored by many notable people, including Turing award
winner Jim Gray, and our own Michael Stonebraker, was the result of
the Sequoia 2000 Research Project discussed below and elsewhere. If
you're interested in Earth Science, it's worth reading. Its focus
was on outlining an alternative to the then-proposed and later funded
Hughes EOS-DIS system now known as ECS, but many of the points it makes
are germane to the larger questions of Earth Science. Follow this
link for HTML access to it.
The
BigSur Research Project: NASA EOS-DIS Alternative Architecture Prototype
The
BigSur Research project, more properly known as "The EOS-DIS Alternative
Architecture Prototype Project", was a follow-on to the Sequoia
2000 effort. Its goals were to take the intellectual capital generated
by Sequoia 2000 and harness it in development of a functioning system.
The architecture was set as a database-centric view of the world. Because
so much work had been done previously, and because the staff brought in
to implement the system were "database heavyweights", things progressed
quickly. A functioning prototype was created within the first 5 months,
though its functionality was somewhat limited.
By the close of the first year the system had reached most of its primary
goals, and at 18 months, the system was very solid and stretch-goals were
being addressed.
For
more information, see the University of California, Berkeley, BigSur
site. Also of interest are miscellaneous white-papers from the Sequoia
2000 era, notably the seminal "Alternative Architecture
Study" which was the vision behind BigSur.
The
Sequoia 2000 Research Project
Sequoia
2000 was a very large research project which brought together Earth Scientists
from every conceivable discipline. The questions surrounding how to perform
Earth Science Computing in an interdisciplinary, distributed manner was
the topic for discussion. Issues from remote sensing strategies to visualization
technologies to the practical aspects of storage were all addressed in
depth. The goal was to create the architecture required, and implement
as many of the actual component parts as was possible.
It
succeeded in many ways. Progress was made in each discipline, and many
fruitful results were obtained. The grant expired before a comprehensive
system could be brought together "under one roof". As a consequence, a
second, much smaller grant was obtained from NASA and the NSF which sought
to create the unifying components. That project was known as BigSur.
For
more information, see the University of California, Berkeley, Sequoia
2000 site. There is a substantial technical library available there
which houses white-papers of all descriptions.
The ESIP
Federation White Papers
A
little background on these selected whitepapers: The Earth System Information
Partner Federation (ESIP)
is a prototype of a federated organization of investigators in Earth science
funded by NASA. Science
Tools is involved with the ESIP Federation in two ways: We have customers
who are Federation members, and our Chief Scientist, Richard Troy, is
a named investigator on OceanESIP,
one of the Federations members.
We
have the following documents pertaining specifically to the ESIP Federation
on our site:
American
Geophysical Union, Fall 1998 Conference, Session U11A-10
(Thanks
to Andrew Alden for finding
the previously "missing link")
R:
0830h
AN: U11A-10
TI: Earth Science Data Processing, Storage and Retrieval
AU: *Troy, R M
EM: rtroy@cs.berkeley.edu
AF: Berkeley Earth Science Tools, Inc.
613 85th Avenue Oakland, CA 94621 United States
AU: *Troy, R M
EM: rtroy@cs.berkeley.edu
AF: University of California, Berkeley
339 Soda Hall Berkeley, CA 94720-1776 United States
AB: In January, 1998, a new database-centric system began production processing
Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) data. This new system offers
its users a scientifically defensible, general solution for Earth Science
data management and processing. The system is exceptionally flexible and
is most suited to data which has geospatial and temporal features and
for which processing or processing history is important. It offers many
promises, among them automation, easy and sophisticated retrieval mechanisms,
a real opportunity to foster inter and intra-discipline cooperation, and
the end of 're-inventing the wheel' whenever an Earth Science project
is undertaken.
The author
will discuss how meta-data regarding processing is structured to constitute
a work-flow system, and how this leads to scientific defensibility through
known lineage of all data products. Illustration of how scientific processes
are encapsulated will illuminate how the system may dispatch them to
be executed when desired, how this may be automated, and how previously
written processes and functions are integrated into the new system.
Meta-data
basics will illustrate how intricate relationships may easily be represented
and used to good advantage. Retrieval techniques will be discussed including
trade-offs of using meta-data versus embedded data, how the two may
be integrated, and how simplifying assumptions may or may not help.
This system
is based upon the experience of the Sequoia 2000 and BigSur research
projects at the University of California, Berkeley, whose goals were
to find an alternative to the Hughes EOS-DIS system. In continuity of
the Climate and Global Change theme of this conference, the system is
being deployed at UCLA under Roberto Mechoso for use with his Earth
System Model.
DE: 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings)
DE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields
DE: 6339 System design
DE: 6344 System operation and management
SC: U
MN: 1998 Fall Meeting
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