OpenEarth - Inter-Company Management of: Data, Models, Tools & Knowledge

OpenEarth - Inter-Company Management of: Data, Models, Tools & Knowledge

Van Koningsveld, M.
De Boer, G.J.
Baart, F.
Damsma, T.
Den Heijer, C.
Van Geer, P.
De Sonnevile, B.

Civil Engineering and Geosciences

Hydraulic Engineering

2010-09-08

Research, consultancy as well as construction projects commonly spend a significant part of their budget to set-up some basic infrastructure for data and knowledge management, most of which dissipates again once the project is finished. Standing initiatives so far have not been successful in providing a proper data and knowledge management system for data, models and tools. OpenEarth (www.openearth.eu) was developed as a free and open source alternative to the current often ad-hoc approaches to deal with data, models and tools. OpenEarth as a whole (philosophy, user community, infrastructure and workflow) is the first comprehensive approach to handling data, models and tools that actually works in practice at a truly significant scale. It is implemented effectively not only at its originally founding organizations Delft University of Technology and Deltares but also in a number of sizeable research programs with multiple partners (such as the 28 million euro 4-year research program Building with Nature – 19 partners from 1 country) from multiple countries (such as the 4.6 million euro 3-year EU FP7 research program MICORE – 15 partners from 9 countries). For data, models and tools that are truly strategic and really cannot be shared, OpenEarth stimulates the setup of internal OpenEarth clones. This way the OpenEarth workflow can still be adopted, promoting collaboration within the organization, while taking care of security considerations at the same time. This paper describes the OpenEarth philosophy, its infrastructure and main workflow protocols. To illustrate the systems practical effectiveness the paper finishes with an example of OpenEarth as it is applied in Building with Nature.

workflow management
protocols
web services
version control
OPeNDAP
netCDF

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:87e0b19a-b6c9-4761-a17c-91f525577499

Proceedings WODCON XIX Conference : Dredging Makes the World a Better Place, 9-14 September 2010, Beijing, China

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2010 The Author(s)