GEON has been working diligently over the past few months to make improvements to the GEON LiDAR System, available via its portal. Updates have been made to the user interface as well as to the underlying architecture to improve the user’s experience. Notable improvements include the replacement of interactive maps in the portal with Google Maps to provide better base-imagery and geographic context. Also, the LiDAR database is now being hosted on a dedicated Linux-based compute cluster utilizing parallel database technology, yielding significantly faster query times and an overall reduction in job time.

As the sole distribution pathway for the new GeoEarthScope LiDAR datasets, GEON has been adding additional DEMs to the distribution system as they are delivered. Currently, there are 2167 1 km^2 DEM tiles available for download via the GEON Portal. These data are very popular, being accessed by hundreds of users who have downloaded over 5500 DEM tiles thus far.

A Short Course on “Processing and Analysis of GeoEarthscope and Other Community LiDAR Topography Datasets” will be offered April 29-May 1, as part of the UNAVCO 2008 Series. This course will be taught by Chris Crosby, GEON Project, SDSC; Ramon Arrowsmith, Arizona State University; and David Phillips, UNAVCO. This 1.5 day short course will focus on high-resolution topographic data from airborne LiDAR. Although there is no registration deadline, space is limited and registration will be closed when the course becomes full. Full details can be found at http://www.unavco.org/edu_outreach/uscs/2008/LiDAR_Course_2008.html

Developers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), Incorporated Research Institution for Seismology (IRIS), University NAVSTAR Consortium (UNAVCO) and International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) successfully delivered the alpha release of the EarthScope Data Portal (ESDP) on March 1st. This release provides functionality for discovery and download of EarthScope data hosted by United States Seismic Array (USArray), Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) and San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD).

The portal has Google map based elegant search interface that allows users to discover data using spatial and temporal bounds along with the option to search for specific data type. Users can also select multiple datasets and download the bundle as one compressed file. Alpha testers for this portal were nominated by the ESDP management committee, and it is anticipated that the testing phase will be concluded on April 15th. The portal is hosted at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and can be accessed at http://es-portal.geongrid.org:8080/gridsphere/gridsphere . The next major milestone for the ESDP project is the beta release, scheduled for June 1st.

Information and online registration for the Cyberinfrastructure Summer Institute for Geoscientists (CSIG ‘08) is now available online at http://www.geongrid.org/CSIG08/ . This year’s Institute will be held August 11-15, 2008 at the University of California, San Diego. Topics to be covered include: an introduction to Geoinformatics; data integration challenges; data sharing portals and networks; remote-sensing data (including LiDAR); Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services; and visualization of 3D and 4D data.

The registration deadline for CSIG ‘08 is 2 June 2008. Graduate students and post docs, as well as university faculty and instructors with the goal of promoting the development of curricula and courses in geoinformatics, are highly encouraged to apply. Please forward this information to anyone you know who may be interested in this valuable educational opportunity.

The CSIG is made possible through funding provided by the NSF (http://www.nsf.gov ).

The EGU General Assembly will be held this year in Vienna, Austria, from April 13-18. This meeting will bring together geoscientists from all over the world, and will cover all disciplines of the Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences.

GEON PI Chaitan Baru will attend this meeting and present papers on “Mediating Among GeosciML Resources” (Baru, C.; Lin, K.), “Building a Portal Middleware Grid for Geoscience Communities” (Chandra, S.; Baru, C.; Subbarao, K.; Agarwal, A.), and “The GEON Service-Oriented Architecture” (Baru, C.; Chandra, S.; Link, K.; Memon, A.; Youn, C.). GEON team member, Chris Crosby, will also be presenting a paper entitled “Cyberinfrastructure-based distribution pathways to enable access to community LiDAR topography” (Crosby, C.; Arrowsmith, R.; Nandigam, V.; Alex, N.; Memon, A.; Baru, C).

Although the registration deadline has passed, further meeting details can be found at http://meetings.copernicus.org/egu2008/ .

This year’s Geoinformatics 2008 meeting will provide an international forum for researchers and educators from earth and planetary sciences, and information technology/computer science to present new data, data analysis or modeling techniques, visualization schemes or technologies as they relate to developing the cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences.
Globalization of geoinformatics based research and education in support of meeting societal challenges will be a significant theme for the conference.

Geoinformatics 2008 will be held at GeoForschungsZentrum in Potsdam, Germany. Further information, including online registration and abstract submission, can be found at http://gi2008.gfz-potsdam.de/index.php?id=1029 . Travel support for graduate students, post docs, and assistant professors (from U.S. institutions only) may be available from the National Science Foundation (info available at the meeting website).