Home > Archives > John Helly   John Helly San Diego Supercomputer Center La Jolla, CA 92093 helly@sdsc.edu http://www.sdsc.edu/~hellyj SDSC Goes to Sea: From Real-time, Shipboard Data Acquisition to Digital Library Objects The first Floating Digital Library Workshop began on March 5 in Lyttelton Harbor, Christchurch, New Zealand, as the lines are thrown off the R/V Melville to begin a 14-day expedition to Samoa. The cruise was Leg 20 of the Cook Expedition, named for Captain James Cook who sailed and mapped these same waters more than two centuries ago. Workshop participants include the Geological Data Center (GDC) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), the University Libraries, and the SIO Library, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego. A prototype "SIOExplorer" Digital Library system was tested, automatically tagging data streams with metadata and preparing them for online search across the Web as a part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). The SeaBeam multibeam sonar on the SIO vessel maps a swath of the seafloor approximately 20 km wide in deep water, creating real-time contour maps of bathymetry as well as acoustic backscatter. The result of the cruise was approximately 5 GB of new digital data in persistent archive structures, ready for search along with the evolving SIOExplorer collection of data, documentation, reports, images, sampling information and publications from 795 SIO cruises since 1950. Much of this material will be available online as a part of the Digital Library. This talk will present some of the results of the oceanographic expedition described above and at http://www.npaci.edu/online/v6.5/sio.html. This effort will be described in the context of the larger NSF-sponsored NSDL project that is developing modern methods for the publication of arbitrary digital objects, comprised of scientific data, as library-grade objects. The talk will be accompanied by images of the equipment and conditions found on the R/V Melville during the expedition.
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