The overall goal of the workshop is to identify similarities and differences in how cyberinfrastructure programs serve polar sciences versus other disciplines. The workshop and the report will address engagement and connections between computer and polar sciences concerning what can be accomplished in the short-term (1-5 years) and long-term (5-10+ years). The outcomes of this workshop will inform the Polar Cyberinfrastructure Program at the National Science Foundation concerning the past and current polar cyberinfrastrucutre activities and will provide support for a community-driven design and architecture development of a polar science cyberinfrastructure that is aligned with the following end-users' needs: (1) long-term sustainable curatorship, standardization, management and discovery of data and metadata; visualization, manipulation, and analysis; (2) use of high performance computing (HPC) for direct and sustainable advances in current polar research; (3) big data and data access; (4) interoperability with data from other domains; (5) e-learning and educational tools based on cyberinfrastructure components; and (6) virtual organizations.
The workshop will be structured to provide responses to the following questions and requests:
- What cyberinfrastructure (CI) support is currently available to the polar science community and do those existing elements need to be upgraded?
- Create a ranked list of science drivers and challenges made tractable by transformative cyberinfrastructure that the community aims to tackle on a 1-5 year and 5-10 year time frame (a) within polar sciences, and (b) within the Arctic and (c) Antarctic communities.
- Develop a list of data and cyberinfrastructure barriers/limits to further advancing polar science and provide suggestions to overcome these barriers.
- Produce a list of known community resources that the workshop participants feel need to be developed, created, or made easier in terms of cyberinfrastructure to allow them to do the important science they want to do now and in the future.
- Create use cases that illustrate the transformational science that could take place provided sufficient cyberinfrastructure and data tools.
The workshop will host approximately 60 in person participants, comprised of both invited and open-registration attendees. Invitations are being sent to potential participants that have been initially identified by the organizing committee. If you are interested in attending, please be sure to fill out the brief form near the bottom of the workshop website: http://www.pgc.umn.edu/meetings/cyber2013. Given the limited number of participants, the Organizing Committee will review all submissions and notify applicants by August 5th about the outcome of their registration.
Submission deadline: Thursday, 1 August 2013.