CyberWater: An Open Framework for Data and Model Integration in Water Science and Engineering

The CyberWater project is to build an open-data open-model framework for easy and incremental integration of heterogeneous data sources and diverse scientific models across disciplines in the broad water domain. The CyberWater framework extends the open-data open-model framework called Meta-Scientific-Modeling (MSM) that provides a system-wide data and model integration platform. On top of MSM, the CyberWater framework provides a set of toolkits, and external system integration engines, to further facilitate users' scientific modeling and collaboration across disciplines. For example, the developed generic model agent toolkit enables users to integrate their computational models into CyberWater via graphical user interface configuration without coding, which further simplifies the data and model integration and model coupling. CyberWater adopts a graphical scientific workflow system, VisTrails, ensuring data provenance and reproducible computing. CyberWater supports novel access to high-performance computing resources on demand for users' computational expensive model tasks. We demonstrate merits of CyberWater by a use case of hydrologic modeling workflow.