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Chaitan Baru, co-director of the Data and Knowledge Systems (DAKS) program at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, has been invited to deliver the keynote address on "The Future of Production, Distribution, and Use of Data in the Earth Science Community" at an upcoming earth science data workshop sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The Data Access and Usability Workshop is being organized by NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Science Working Group on Data (SWGD) and will be held November 5 and 6, 2003 at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Under Baru's leadership as information technology principal investigator in GEON, the Geosciences Network project, SDSC is playing a central role in building a modern cyberinfrastructure for the earth sciences. In GEON, a large NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) project, IT researchers from SDSC, Penn State University, the Geological Survey of Canada, and San Diego State University are collaborating with geoscientists from Arizona State University, Bryn Mawr College, Cornell University, Rice University, University of Arizona, University of Idaho, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Texas at El Paso, University of Utah, and UNAVCO, as well as the Digital Library for Earth Sciences Education (DLESE) and numerous other partners.

GEON is developing technologies that will enable earth scientists to integrate, analyze, model, and visualize today's enormous and complex multidisciplinary 4-D earth science data sets. As a scientist-centered cyberinfrastructure, GEON is being designed to free researchers to think and be creative by relieving them of onerous data management tasks. By providing leading-edge data integration and grid computing services to support geosciences research and collaboration on scales never before possible, GEON is opening the way to new insights into the complex dynamics of Earth systems.

"Modern information technologies are bringing unprecedented capabilities to advance science," said Baru. "To take advantage of these capabilities, we've learned in GEON that domain scientists, computer scientists, and information technologists all need to work closely together to realize the promise of cyberinfrastructure."

The NASA EOS workshop will include panel discussions and breakouts by individual users describing their research objectives, the types of EOS data they need for their research, how they get the data now and how usable they find the data to be. The workshop will also focus on identifying any barriers users have encountered to data access and use, and how these obstacles have been overcome.

Organizers expect between 70 and 100 people to attend the workshop, including individual users, EOS science team members, and EOS project staff. - Paul Tooby