Designing a road map for geoscience workflows

Advances in geoscience research and discovery are fundamentally tied to data and computation, but formal strategies for managing the diversity of models and data resources in the Earth sciences have not yet been resolved or fully appreciated. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) EarthCube initiative (http://earthcube.ning.com), which aims to support community-guided cyberinfrastructure to integrate data and information across the geosciences, recently funded four community development activities: Geoscience Workflows; Semantics and Ontologies; Data Discovery, Mining, and Integration; and Governance. The Geoscience Workflows working group, with broad participation from the geosciences, cyberinfrastructure, and other relevant communities, is formulating a workflows road map (http://sites.google.com/site/earthcubeworkflow/). The Geoscience Workflows team coordinates with each of the other community development groups given their direct relevance to workflows. Semantics and ontologies are mechanisms for describing workflows and the data they process.