[ESIP-all] FW: FGIT Meeting Announcement - Oct 6 & 7, 2005

Thu Sep 8 15:32:00 EDT 2005

Announcing the Inaugural Meeting of the: 

National Forum on Geosciences Information Technology

October 6-7, 2005
Wardman Park Marriott
2660 Woodley Road, NW 
Washington, DC

Registration and Agenda:
http://www.fgit.org/

Hotel reservations must be made by September 9th to guarantee rate and
availability! 
They can be made directly with the hotel after submitting your
registration through the FGIT registration web page if you are not
applying for travel assistance or through the FGIT web page if you are.

The National Forum for Geosciences Information Technology (FGIT) serves
as a focal point for a national dialog on information technology and
cyberinfrastructure (CI) related issues and challenges across all of the
geosciences through exchange of ideas, experiences, and requirements. It
will foster and support the leveraging of efforts and the development of
guidelines, best practices, new development and deployment teams, and
interoperable software standards.  There will be ample time for
discussing topical issues of interest to attendees in the interactive
and participative format of Open Space Technology (see description after
schedule below).

Should You Attend?

 We are encouraging attendance by CI project leads, developers, users
(researchers and educators including graduate students and post-docs),
systems administrators, representatives from funding agencies, and other
interested parties. 

Sponsors:  NSF, NCSA (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu
<http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/> ), and LEAD (http://lead.ou.edu
<http://lead.ou.edu/> )

Agenda
Thursday, October 6, 2005

8:00 - 8:15 am               Overview of FGIT Concept and Goals,
Organization of the Meeting

8:15 - 9:00 am               NSF Strategy for Cyberinfrastructure (A.
Bement - confirmed)

9:00 - 9:45 am               "A Summary of Community Cyberinfrastructure
Planning and Current                     Activities in the Geosciences"
(M. Leinen - to be confirmed)

9:45 - 10:00 am             Questions and Discussion (Bement and Leinen)

10:00 - 10:15 am           Break

10:15 - 11:30 am           Agency Activities in Geosciences Technology
Development and Deployment 

                          NOAA - Glenn Rutledge - to be confirmed
                          NASA - to be determined
                          DOE - to be determined

11:30 - 12:00 pm           Lunch (box lunch served - participants can
mingle)

12:00 - 1:15 pm           Open Space Agenda Setting And Discussion Group
Sign-Up

1:15 - 5:00 pm               Open Space Discussion Groups ( three
75-minute blocks - break food                            available
mid-afternoon)

5:00 - 7:00 pm               Reception and Technology
Demonstrations/Posters/Booths

7:00 pm                    Dinner (on your own)

Friday, 7 October 2005

8:00 - 8:15 am               Announcements 

8:15 - 9:45 am              Global Theme #1:  Data Challenges  (three
30-min presentations)

.                         Data Management Practices and Challenges in
Geosciences Today - Chaitan Baru
.                         Distributed Data Management - to be determined
.                         Metadata Challenges - to be determined 

9:45 - 10:00 am             Break (food available)

10:00 - 11:30 am           Global Theme #2:  Analysis and Visualization
Challenges

.                         Visualization Tools and Challenges in the
Geosciences - Don Middleton
.                         Visual Analytics - Welge/Cox
.                                 Data/Media Fusion, Comparison and
Visualization - to be determined

11:30 - 12:00 pm           Lunch (box lunch served - participants can
mingle) 

12:00 - 12:30 pm           Open Space Agenda Revision-topics can be
introduced, combined, etc.  

12:30 - 3:30 pm             Open Space Discussion Groups meet in three
60-minute blocks

3:30 - 4:30 pm            Open Space Closing Circle: Review of
Accomplishments And Next Steps
Open Space Technologies
Both afternoons activities will be carried out using Open Space
Technology (http://www.openspaceworld.org/), a simple, powerful approach
to dynamically organizing meetings so that the participants identify and
discuss the issues that are most important to them. Through this
process, they document and prioritize ideas, data, recommendations,
conclusions, further questions, and "next step" action plans. Open Space
Technology has been used with diverse groups ranging in size from 5 to
1000 people, and it is particularly well suited for dealing with the
diverse interests of attendees that cannot be organized with an agenda
in advance, allowing ideas to surface from the interaction itself. The
beauty of this approach is that people form or join groups around topics
that interest them, such that the groups are fueled by people-emerging
leaders-who want to take responsibility for that issue. Participants
stay in groups only when they feel that they are learning and
contributing to the topic at hand, otherwise they may move to another
group. This format particularly supports information sharing across
disciplines because people are not assigned to their groups based on
categories of what they already know. Open Space meetings have been
described as having "the energy of a good coffee break"-referring to the
common observation that coffee breaks are the best part of a conference
or meeting.

Although Open Space is a flexible and participant-driven activity, it
produces concrete deliverables. Every single issue that the participants
consider to be important will be covered, and the groups produce a full
written record of their discussions by the end of the meeting. As
participants share resources and expertise with each other, the
documentation captures all these details. This knowledge base, combined
with rosters of who participated in each session, provides the basis for
continued conversations in the months that follow the Open Space event.
People can find out who in the participant network shares their
interests and continue to exchange information and ideas, explore
collaborative efforts, or arrange subsequent meetings. 

Unlike traditional discussion sessions that are tied tightly to
particular presentations, the Open Space discussion at FGIT will allow
people to continue to explore topics raised on the first day during the
second day as well as integrate day 1 discussions more closely with the
global themes topics of the second morning. Thus, the Global Theme
sessions move participants from the big picture of day 1 to the hands-on
technical elements of day 2, allowing participants to pursue discussion
of themes within the larger context. 

For the FGIT meeting, topics for Open Space discussion as determined by
attendees could include: 

.         Data management
.         Data publication
.         Metadata-generation and protocols
.         Ontology and cataloging
.         Federal agency initiatives
.         How universities can coordinate their efforts
.         Visualization tools
.         Visual analytics
.         Data fusion
.         Sensors
.         Creating integrated CI
.         Nuts and bolts of running geoscience CI at a local level
.         Geoscience CI in education
.         What technologies are still missing
.         Involving the community in geosciences CI prototyping
.         Integration of CI between different geosciences
sub-disciplines
.         Role of academic societies
.         Example initiatives of geosciences CI implementation
.         Dynamic and adaptive CI environments
.         Modeling frameworks
.         Streaming/real time data
.         Data and system interoperability
.         Data discovery systems
.         Networking and telemetry
.         Intellectual property
.         Stewardship of non-digital resources
More on Motivation and Purpose

During the past several years, researchers, funding agencies, lawmakers,
policymakers and private companies have directed considerable attention
to the role, provision, and innovation of persistent information
technology, particularly in the form of cyberinfrastructure (CI), in the
U.S. science and engineering enterprise. Numerous community workshops
and other meetings have been held and reports have been written to
organize views on this topic within and across traditional academic
disciplines. Visionary plans also abound.

Further, a large number of CI research and development projects are
underway in the geoscience and related communities for enabling
breakthrough and grand challenge research. Government agencies are
supporting numerous team efforts to develop and apply CI technology to
meet needs across the geosciences and related domains (e.g., CLEANER,
CONDUIT, CRAFT, CUAHSI, DLESE, EarthScope, ESDIS, ESG, ESMF, GCMD, GEON,
LEAD, LOOKING, MADIS, MAEVis NEESGrid, NEON, NOMADS, NVODS, ORION, SCEC,
SEEK, THREDDS). These projects often include domain researchers,
education experts, computer scientists, and computer applications
specialists, demonstrating the many areas that CI technology must cover
and support. The large number of these efforts illustrates the magnitude
of the current effort in the geoscience community to realize the
benefits of advances of CI in research, operations, and education.  

Not surprisingly, these projects have many common requirements including
the use of new sensors, powerful computers, large storage devices, fast
networks, and federated data repositories. Software requirements include
assimilation and predictive models, data mining/analysis and
visualization, grid and web service development tools and, ultimately,
standards for integrating these components. However, these projects face
duplication of effort, emerging but incomplete standards, notable
disconnects between the research and operational communities, unstable
middleware environments on which applications are being built, and a
lack of support for technology deployment, adoption and maintenance.
Further, the potential implications of these developments for current
and future local computing environments (e.g., department computer
systems) is not broadly understood. Thus, the potential impact of CI
activities on research, education, and operations is not being fully
realized. 

The National Forum for Geosciences Information Technology (FGIT -
pronounced "figit") is proposed as a focal point for a national dialog
on technology across all of the geosciences to address these CI issues
and challenges through exchange of ideas, experiences, and requirements.
It will foster and support the leveraging of efforts and the development
of guidelines, best practices, new development and deployment teams, and
interoperable software standards. Participants will include project
leads, developers, users (researchers and educators including graduate
students and post-docs), systems administrators, representatives from
funding agencies, and other interested parties. FGIT meetings will
include selected updates on important CI issues from the agency,
university, and corporate perspectives, on key advances in CI that can
benefit the geosciences, and on topics that cut across the geoscience
and environmental communities. Attendees will be active participants in
the meeting, bringing their interests into discussion groups through the
use of Open Space Technologies. They will have ample opportunity to
interact with one another, sharing practical concerns and solutions to
CI related issues. In this way, FGIT will augment other national and
international meetings that have more disciplinary and/or
developmentally focused CI agendas (e.g., the AMS IIPS Conference, AGU
meetings, Global Grid Forum).  The theme of the inaugural meeting of
FGIT is Advancing the Development, Coordination, Deployment and Use of
Information Technologies for Enabling Research, Education, and
Operations in the Geosciences.

FGIT will not duplicate or supplant other planning activities or
projects but rather provide a broad communication fabric of benefit to
them. The principal outcome of FGIT is expected to be a better educated
and more effective information technology literate geosciences workforce
and an associated CI enterprise that develops and supports
tools/capabilities that lead to new insights, improved education, and
informed public decision making 

Bob Wilhelmson
  Professor/Department of Atmospheric Science
  Director of Cyber Applications and Communities, NCSA
  Chief Scientist, NCSA

Department of Atmospheric Sciences
105 S. Gregory Dr.
Urbana, IL 61801
http://redrock.ncsa.uiuc.edu/CMG/
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
(217) 333-8651 _______________________________________________ LEAD-PI
mailing list LEAD-PI at caps.ou.edu
http://www.caps.ou.edu/mailman/listinfo/lead-pi 

Bob Wilhelmson
  Professor/Department of Atmospheric Science
  Director of Cyber Applications and Communities, NCSA
  Chief Scientist, NCSA

Department of Atmospheric Sciences
105 S. Gregory Dr.
Urbana, IL 61801
http://redrock.ncsa.uiuc.edu/CMG/
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
(217) 333-8651 

Bob Wilhelmson
  Professor/Department of Atmospheric Science
  Director of Cyber Applications and Communities, NCSA
  Chief Scientist, NCSA

Department of Atmospheric Sciences
105 S. Gregory Dr.
Urbana, IL 61801
http://redrock.ncsa.uiuc.edu/CMG/
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
(217) 333-8651 

Bob Wilhelmson
  Professor/Department of Atmospheric Science
  Director of Cyber Applications and Communities, NCSA
  Chief Scientist, NCSA

Department of Atmospheric Sciences
105 S. Gregory Dr.
Urbana, IL 61801
http://redrock.ncsa.uiuc.edu/CMG/
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
(217) 333-8651 

Bob Wilhelmson
  Professor/Department of Atmospheric Science
  Director of Cyber Applications and Communities, NCSA
  Chief Scientist, NCSA

Department of Atmospheric Sciences
105 S. Gregory Dr.
Urbana, IL 61801
http://redrock.ncsa.uiuc.edu/CMG/
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
(217) 333-8651 

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