About EarthByte
The EarthByte research group aims to connect geodynamic modelling tools to geological and geophysical data in space and geological time.
EarthByte is an international e-research project aimed at implementing interoperability of plate tectonic data and geodynamic computing services for applied and fundamental research purposes. EarthByte is currently funded through the AuScope National Collaborative Research InfraStructure (NCRIS) Program. It was previously funded by the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) and by an Australian Research Council e-Research pilot project and is a major component of the APAC Geoscience Initiative. EarthByte is leveraging technologies developed in international sister projects such as the NERC data grid and the CHRONOS project.
Our Aims
The aim of the EarthByte research group is to:
• Provide an infrastructure for linking geological/geophysical observations and
models to each other via palaeogeographic/plate kinematic models.
• Leverage technologies developed in international "sister" projects such as
the NERC Data Grid and CHRONOS through helping to coordinate international efforts in interoperability in paleogeography and dynamic earth modeling
• Allow open source and proprietary solutions to co-exist and not be based on any single technology platform.
• Connect the open source and architecture-independent GPlates (Müller et al., 2005) and GMT software (Wessel and Smith, 1991) into a Web accessible service oriented
software component embedded in the APAC Geoscience grid infrastructure.
• Use standard encoding patterns, based on ISO Geography Markup Language (GML), to maximise interoperability andd flexibility of the solution.
• Further explore test-beds for linking GML-encoded paleogeographic data to numerical modelling software such as Underworld.
• Encompass the technical standards, policy and governance framework to allow for semantic interoperability to be established within the community of practice.
• Provide the bridge between plate tectonic and paleogeographic data management, research, and associated computing and business needs. In particular, it will provide the means for technical collaboration between these functions
• Be implemented within the context of the APAC Geosciences Project. This means that EarthByte will conform to relevant government policies, be able to seamlessly access services provided by external agencies, become the primary mechanism for delivery of paleogeographic data and models to external agencies and be a focal point for resourcing the resolution of technical and institutional issues hindering interoperability within and across the community
National and International Collaborations
EarthByte brings together research strengths from academia and government organisations
across a wide range of national and international Earth science and information technology-based
disciplines. The international GPlates Steering Committee (www.gplates.org) has jointly
developed a global model over the past 15 years that defines the movement of the major plates on
the Earth. The APAC (Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing) Geosciences project
members are uniquely placed to develop the next generation e-research framework for the
Geosciences in Australia. Both GPlates and APAC Geoscience efforts are coordinated by A/Prof.
D. Müller. The additional research groups involved include the CHRONOS project (managed by
Dr. C. Cervato, and closely linked to the US GEONGRID), CSIRO Exploration and Mining, the
Tectonic Special Research Centre (TSRC) (headed by Prof. P. Cawood), the UK-based NERC Data
Grid (represented by Dr. A. Woolf), IFREMER (Brest, France, represented by Dr. W. Roest,
Director of its Marine Geosciences Department), the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar Research,
Germany (represented by Dr. K. Gohl), the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP, represented
by M. Coffin) and the China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, (Prof. X. Xie), whose Geosphere
Evolvement and Mineral Resource Laboratory is a National Key Project in China. By contributing
to the development of an architecture of loosely coupled distributed databases and soft
infrastructure, efforts can focus on problem solving utilizing 4D databases and some of the most
advanced Earth process simulation and visualisation groups such as the Australian Computational
Earth Science Simulator (ACcESS), and the GeoFramework (www.geoframework.org) based at the
California Institute of Technology.
Other universities or institutions involved in EarthByte include:
• Scripps Institute of Oceanography
• Ocean Research Institute, University of Toyko
• Norwegian Geological Survey
• IPG Paris
• ETH Zurich
• ENS Lyon
• CRPG Nancy
• Université de Rennes
• Université Jean Monnet St Etienne
• Université de Lausanne
