Towards a Collaborative Portal Environment for Earthquake Engineering

Abstract eng:
A “cyberinfrastructure” encompasses advanced scientific computing as well as a more comprehensive infrastructure for research and education based upon distributed, federated networks of computers, information resources, on-line instruments, and human interfaces. The NEES Cyberinfrastructure Center (NEESit) has been created to deliver tools and infrastructure to enable earthquake engineers to remotely participate in experiments, perform hybrid simulations, organize and share data, and collaborate with colleagues. One of the key challenges in building such cyberinfrastructures is how to expose the back-end functionality to the end-users in an easy to use manner, in such a way that it is easy to implement, maintain, and manage. With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, the trend has been for "Web portals" to aggregate information content from diverse sources that are implemented as a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), and present them in a unified way. We are proposing an SOA for NEESit, along with a Web portal environment for accessing back-end computational and data resources. In this paper, we describe the current and proposed NEESit architectures, and present our initial prototype called “NEESsphere”. NEESsphere features include the ability to contribute and share files and databases, access to back-end computational resources for running simulations, earthquake engineering examples and tutorials utilizing scientific workflow tools, and an online educational hybrid simulation test environment. We strongly believe that portals and SOAs are the future of all cyberinfrastructures, due to flexibility, easy of implementation and use, and the ability to leverage a diverse set of information sources at the back-end.

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