Data Albums: An Event Driven Search, Aggregation and Curation Tool for Earth Science

Approaches used in Earth science research such as case study analysis and climatology studies involve discovering and gathering diverse data sets and information to support the research goals. To gather relevant data and information for case studies and climatology analysis is both tedious and time consuming. Current Earth science data systems are designed with the assumption that researchers access data primarily by instrument or geophysical parameter. In cases where researchers are interested in studying a significant event, they have to manually assemble a variety of datasets relevant to it by searching the different distributed data systems. This paper presents a specialized search, aggregation and curation tool for Earth science to address these challenges. The search rool automatically creates curated 'Data Albums', aggregated collections of information related to a specific event, containing links to relevant data files [granules] from different instruments, tools and services for visualization and analysis, and information about the event contained in news reports, images or videos to supplement research analysis. Curation in the tool is driven via an ontology based relevancy ranking algorithm to filter out non relevant information and data.