19th
International CODATA Conference
Category: Interoperability
The Space Physics Interactive Data Resource (SPIDR) development in preparation for the electronic Geophysical Year eGY-2007
Dr. Mikhail N. Zhizhin
(jjn@wdcb.ru),
Eric A. Kihn (Eric.A.Kihn@noaa.gov),
NOAA/NGDC, USA
The Space Physics Interactive Data Resource (SPIDR) is a distributed network
of synchronous databases and application servers designed to allow a space weather
modeling and prediction customer, or application,
to intelligently access and manage historical space physics data for integration
with virtual environment models and real-time space weather forecasts. Each
SPIDR server resides at a parallel computer cluster and provides fuzzy logic
based searching on a set of databases of space weather parameters. The system
is designed to allow a user to specify desired spatial, temporal, and parameter
conditions in fuzzy linguistic and/or numeric terms and to receive a ranked
list of events best matching the desired conditions in the historical archive.
Once discovered, the client can request dynamical temporal and spatial visualization
using a set of communicating Java applets, browse the archive of Sun and Earth
satellite images, and request delivery of the data formatted for inclusion in
model runs. Each SPIDR server has a database management interface, which allows
data updates performed either by a local user or by another SPIDR server from
the Net. The servers communicate to each other for scheduled mirroring of the
data and software. Algorithmic and programming patterns developed and utilized
in SPIDR are general enough to be used in other Internet-based scientific data
mining and visualization systems.
International bodies involved
in the data exchange within SPIDR are World Data Centers
for Solar-Terrestrial Physics. The project has two key development centers: one at National Geophysics Data Center (NGDC) in
In 2003 NGDC performed
a SPIDR usability study using an independent web-development company. Results
and recommendations of the study are incorporated in the new version of SPIDR
system. In 2004-2006 we plan to extend the new version of SPIDR with the three
main goals: 1) to implement real-time data loading and synchronization between
nodes, 2) to provide automated and manual data quality verification tools, and
3) to improve usability of the web interface. All the tasks require international
cooperation between SPIDR software developers, data managers, and system reviewers
and testers. The resulting portable and extendable open source software product
will be used by CODATA task forces and