GeoEDF: An Extensible Geospatial Data Framework for FAIR Science

Collaborative scientific research is now increasingly conducted online in web-based research platforms termed “science gateways”. Most science gateways provide common capabilities including data management and sharing, scientific code development, high performance computing (HPC) integration, and scientific workflow execution of varying automation. Despite the availability of scientific workflow frameworks such as Pegasus and workflow definition languages such as the Common Workflow Language (CWL), in practice typical workflows on science gateways still involve a mix of non-reusable code, desktop tools, and intermediate data wrangling. With the growing emphasis on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) science, such mixed workflows present a significant challenge to ensuring compliance to these principles. These challenges are further compounded in the earth sciences where researchers spend inordinate amounts of time manually acquiring, wrangling, and processing earth observation data from repositories managed by organizations such as NASA, USGS, etc. Our extensible geospatial data framework, GeoEDF is designed to address these challenges, making remote datasets directly usable in computational code and facilitating earth science workflows that execute entirely in a science gateway. In this paper we describe the design of GeoEDF, current implementation status, and future work.