Context ofcommunity support in ACTRIS

Complete ACTRIS report on Community Support available at: https://envriplus.manageprojects.com/projects/requirements/notebooks/470/pages/36/comments/389/attachments/608/download

Summary of ACTRIS requirements for community support

Detailed requirements

Background

The ACTRIS Data Centre consists of three topical data repositories archiving the measurement data, which are all linked through the ACTRIS data portal to provide a single access point to all data. Hence, the ACTRIS Data Centre is founded on 3 topical data repositories:

• Near-surface aerosol and trace gas data are reported to EBAS
• Aerosol profile data are reported to the EARLINET Data base
• LIDAR data (acronym for Light Detection And Ranging), which is a remote sensing technology that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser and analyzing the reflected light.
• Cloud profile data are reported to the CLOUDNET data base

Training Requirements

Currently, ACTRIS is not using any e-infrastructure technology, but in the future, they would like to use some.  Furthermore, each community has their own set of customized training plans. Currently, ACTRIS has some courses and documentation in the web. They have already some courses and documentation in the web [1] for teaching how to use the data products provided by ACTRIS. In the future, they are thinking to run some webinars for explaining how to use their data products.

ACTRIS is investigating how to use HPC technology for processing cloud radar data.

Probably a subset of ACTRIS community will be interested in receive some training courses on e-Infrastructure technology. But applications will need to be filtered through RI co-ordination.

May be a good idea to train some scientists within ACTRIS communities in cloud computing, and platforms for performing trainings (or webinars) to users (e.g. Adobe connection).

The audience within ACTRIS can be divided in 3 levels:

• People that belong to ACTRIS RI and want to use the data products
• Management, people that are in the coordination of the RI
• Technicians

The most appropriate method to deliver this training, would be the ACTRIS’ website and/or a targeted session at community specific workshop.

Requirements for the Community Support Subsystem

The required functionalities are mailing list, wiki, twitter (for inform people within and outside ACTRIS), announcement through the website, forums on the website (for inside ACTRIS), events notifications and documentation. Recently, it has been introduced issue tracker to link data users and providers, and to follow up on feedback on datasets at individual level

The non-functional requirement identified by ACTRIS is the registration of users to get the data from the database for  two main reasons: statistical and protection of the data. Open source code and intellectual property right for some algorithms developed in ACTRIS.

About the standards, most of the data is in NetCDF format, but ACTRIS is moving to CF(Climate and Forecast )1.5-Compliant format. For near surface data the datasets are archived and provided in NASA-Ames 100.

In the description of the databases they have stored the metadata, which is also available in the website. The data and metadata can be linked (but no with PIDs) by the name of the files.

ACTRIS uses as community software: mailing list, forums, Skype, Web, Issue Tracker, Teleconference

References:

1. http://actris.nilu.no/Content/Resources/Products/
2. http://indico.github.io/

Formalities (who & when)