Earth Cube DCL released

Dear Colleagues:

NSF's GEO directorate and Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) have released the following Dear Colleague Letter. It solicits from the community novel and transformative concepts and approaches to meet the challenges of modern, data-intensive science and education for the entire geosciences community. NSF plans a rapid process to develop an integrated data cyberinfrastructure by calling the community to action in a series of webinars. The webinars will be an opportunity to lay out the GEO-OCI vision and to engage the community to begin organizing. We invite you and interested colleagues to participate in the first webinar on July 11 at 4pm. Details of how to register and participate in the WebEx session are contained in the Dear Colleague Letter. The WebEx session will be held in room 110 at the National Science Foundation’s headquarters for those who wish to attend in person. Please, let us know if we can provide more information on the WebEx.

A charrette meeting will follow the webinars to develop concepts for an agile and robust geosciences-integrating architecture and infrastructure. Soon after the charrette, NSF will support the community to explore early stage developments of one or more approaches to this cyberinfrastructure. These approaches must be potentially transformative and untested on several levels, including the teams that will be organized, the architectures that will be created, and the science that will be enabled by the proposed cyberinfrastructure. The next step, in FY2012, will be support for up to three prototypes for cyberinfrastructure systems to meet the needs of the entire Geosciences community. These prototypes will be rigorously reviewed after 18 months for specific milestones and accomplished goals prior to a scale-up phase.

NSF seeks to quickly respond to data challenges in the geosciences community and build momentum for the FY2012 CIF21 initiative.

Geosciences Directorate
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22230
Phone: (703) 292-8556
Fax: (703) 292-9025

Dear Colleague Letter: The "Earth Cube" - Towards a National Data Infrastructure for Earth System Science

Available Formats:

HTML: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11065/nsf11065.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_179
TXT: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11065/nsf11065.txt?WT.mc_id=USNSF_179
PDF: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11065/nsf11065.pdf?WT.mc_id=USNSF_179

Document Number: nsf11065