Blogs

This was a great introduction week to both CMOP and the state of Oregon itself. I've been doing a lot of adjusting, but it's been great!

Coming from the East Coast, it's an exciting experience to get to know the Portland area. And, as a math major, I've been spending a lot of time this week doing some literature reviews to get up to speed with the ecological information needed in my project.

My first week @ CMOP was pretty easy. The first two days or so I didnt exactly know what my project would because some last minute changes had to be made. But the rest of the week I spent learning about the Python programming language and the Google Application Engine. I even wrote a simple program and uploaded it unto the google server. Overall my first week was very progressive.

Made it through my first four days as an intern. I’d like to thank my parents and . . . just kidding. Really though, I didn’t beak anything so I’m happy. The real challenge this week has been getting to work. I live in downtown Portland and commute using the Max, for those of you non-Portlanders that’s somewhat like the Bart in San Francisco (public transportation). I walk 45 minutes to the Max station every day. While I could take a bus I like the brisk morning atmosphere. Everyone is out to accomplish something, may that be their morning caffeine fix or getting to work on time, they’re all out for a reason. Once on the Max though I’m set. I just need to get out of bed.

A design goal for the Product Factory was to ensure that a permanent url existed for every product. Although every image and dataset generated through the factory is addressable in this way, "mashups" and HTML forms involving factory products must be manipulated interactively.

For example, a CMOP investigator was recently interested in inspecting Cast 77 and Cast 83 from the August 2007 cruise.

On her behalf, a data curator might gather up the relevant links like this:

Alaskan 1964 event Pacific view

The halls of the Cooley Science Center were hauntingly quiet at 8 a.m. this morning as I started my first day at CMOP. I was hired to be the web/marketing coordinator, a great opportunity to help tell their story. As I walked through the silent building, I wondered how much was actually going on in the center. Those concerns would all fade within the first hour.

Cast 37
Cast 37 Location

Hourly data from a variety of sources extracted from the NANOOS database are attached.

We can easily create factory products to expose this data.

Further, these datasets ought to be extractable by a single query rather than one for each platform. Quarry supports this kind of interface.

Each platform generates measurements with a potentially unique signature. Quarry uses a generic RDF-like data model to enable uniform access to everything, but partitions incoming data by signature to maintain interactive performance.

Digital image processing and classification algorithms; this will be important for classification of plankton images, and also for remote sensing (feature tracking). Just starting to learn about it and looking for good books...

Jim Gray, a Turing award winning computer science researcher at Microsoft Research, has used a "20 questions" methodology to gather data management requirements from scientists in Astronomy, Ecology, Materials Engineering, and more. Each of these efforts led to very successful projects.