Geospatial data is now increasingly used with tools in diverse fields such as agronomy, hydrology and sociology to gain a better understanding of scientific data. Funded by the NSF DIBBS program, the GABBS project seeks to create reusable building blocks aiding researchers in adding geospatial data processing, visualization and curation to their tools. GABBS leverages the HUBzero cyberinfrastructure platform and iRODS to build a web-based collaborative research platform with enhanced geospatial capabilities. HUBzero is unique in its availability of a rapid tool development kit that simplifies web-enabling existing tools. Its support for dataset DOI association enables citable tool results. In short, it provides a seamless path from data collection, to simulation and publication and can benefit from iRODS data management at each step. Scientific tools often require and generate metadata with their outputs. Given the structured nature of geospatial data, automatic metadata capture is vital in avoiding repetitive work. iRODS microservices enable this automation of data processing, metadata capture and indexing for searchability. They also allow for similar offline ingestion of external research data. The iRODS Fuse filesystem mounts directly onto the hub, enabling tools to refer to local file paths, simplifying development. We will discuss this work of integrating iRODS with HUBzero in the GABBS project and share our experience and lessons learned with the iRODS user community.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Rajesh Kalyanam; Rob Campbell; Sam Wilson; Pascal Meunier; Lan Zhao; Betsy A Hillery; Carol Song (2016), "Integrating HUBzero and iRODS: Geospatial Data Management for Collaborative Scientific Research (iRODS User Group Meeting, 2016)," https://mygeohub.org/resources/1186.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. GABBs
2. HubZero
3. iRODS
4. UGM