Geographic information is collected to support scientific investigations and decision-making in a wide variety of application domains (e.g., ecological and environmental sciences, transportation, public health, and business). Enormous computational resources are needed to store and manage geographic information that is collected for such diverse purposes, and to conduct computationally-intensive geographic information analysis. This type of analysis is a main focus of Geographic Information Science (GIScience), an interdisciplinary field involving geography and other social sciences, computer science, geodesy, and information sciences to study generic issues about the development and use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The purpose of this project is to develop the TeraGrid GIScience Gateway to provide user-friendly capabilities for performing geographic information analysis using TeraGrid, and help non-technical users directly benefit from accessing cyberinfrastructure capabilities.

TeraGrid GIScience Gateway

1. You need to have access to a RPG (Random Point Generator) portlet and DMS (Dynamically Memorized Stragety) portlet to proceed
2. Use RPG to create a synthetic dataset, and save it:
   1. Click “Random Point Generator” menu
   2. Create a rectangle-shape dataset: simply click “next”
   3. Generate a dataset with a specified number of points, e.g. 10000: in “Specify random points by”, select “Number”; then put 10000 in the text field
   4. Set “Number of Cluster Seeds” to a small number, e.g., 4
   5. Set “Size of Contagious Radius/Standard Deviation” to a small number, e.g., 5
   6. Click “next”
   7. Click “Save” to save the dataset for DMS use
3. Use DMS to interpolate the dataset using TeraGrid
   1. In “Create a DMS job” section, please find the dataset which was just created at the previous step
   2. Default values for other parameters are already set. Click “Create and Submit” to create a DMS job that is to be submitted to one of the three TeraGrid sites: UC, NCSA, or SDSC
   3. A DMS job is submitted. Click “Refresh” to monitor the job execution status. DMS job execution is quick, but depending on the computing resource availability of the selected TeraGrid site. If you see job status as “pending”, that means the TeraGrid site is busy. In a production run, we use resource reservation mechanisms provided by TeraGrid to ensure the availability of requested resources for computation execution
   4. When the job is finished, by clicking “Refresh”, you will be redirected to a visualization page automatically. The visualization is based on Google Map.
   5. Click “return” on the visualization page to return to DMS portlet.

1. Illustration (AVI video): Geospatial analysis using Spatial-Temporal Data Explorer as data input and DMS (Dynamically Memorized Strategy) as analyzer (to be uploaded)