1. The Earth System Curator Metadata Infrastructure for Climate Modeling Rocky Dunlap Georgia Tech

2. What is the Earth System Curator? The goal of Curator is to link climate datasets with a detailed description of the model that ran to produce the dataset Use cases for climate model metadata  Provenance (history of what happened)  Archival and search (for models and datasets)  Model inter-comparison  Compatibility checking  Generation of coupler components

3. Collaborators Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF)  Software infrastructure to facilitate building numerical Earth System models  Component-based model development  Built in tools for managing common modeling tasks (coupling fields, calendars, grid creation, etc). Earth System Grid (ESG)  A large scale distributed portal for hosting data produced by Earth System models  Services such as dataset ingest, faceted search, dataset browsing, viewing metadata, downloading datasets

4. Getting Model Metadata into ESG ESMF modeling components are “self- describing” Metadata is exported from an ESMF component in XML format The XML is ingested into ESG and exposed to the data portal Users discover components and datasets via the portal

5. Metadata Lifecycle

6. 1.ESMF component exports XML metadata 2.The XML is validated and harvested into a Java object representation 3.The Java objects are persisted to a relational database (RDBMS) 4.Metadata in the RDBMS is then harvested into RDF – a Semantic Web ontology language 5.The RDF is accessed by the ESG web portal for faceted search of the metadata

7. ESMF XML Output (example) …… XML output will be available on next ESMF release

8. ESMF XML Output (example) ……

9. ESG Prototype Data Portal Faceted search Harvested component

10. ESG Prototype Data Portal

12. Demo of Dycore Portal http://dycore.ucar.edu/

13. Technical Challenges Along the Way Web-based systems often deal with a lot of data formats. This requires lots of translations.  XML  Java objects  relational database  RDF Collaborative ontology development is challenging. There is a need for both governance structures and tools.  This will continue to affect all areas of e-science

14. Future Work for Curator Continue working with ESG to add more sophisticated metadata to the portal ESMF components to export more detailed XML Collaborate with international partners for designing metadata that can be used by a wide audience