Building Infrastructure for Preservation and Publication of Earthquake Engineering Research Data

The objective of this paper is to showcase the progress of the earthquake engineering community during a decade-long effort supported by the National Science Foundation in the George E. Brown Jr., Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). During the four years that NEES network operations have been headquartered at Purdue University, the NEEScomm management team has facilitated an unprecedented cultural change in the ways research is performed in earthquake engineering. NEES has not only played a major role in advancing the cyberinfrastructure required for transformative engineering research, but NEES research outcomes are making an impact by contributing to safer structures throughout the USA and abroad. This paper reflects on some of the developments and initiatives that helped instil change in the ways that the earthquake engineering and tsunami community share and reuse data and collaborate in general. Received 12 January 2014 | Accepted 26 February 2014 Correspondence should be addressed to Stanislav Pejša, DLRC 333, 207 S. Martin Jischke Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907. Email: [email protected] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 9 International Digital Curation Conference. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. The IJDC is published by the University of Edinburgh on behalf of the Digital Curation Centre. ISSN: 1746-8256. URL: http://www.ijdc.net/ Copyright rests with the authors. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution (UK) Licence, version 2.0. For details please see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/ International Journal of Digital Curation 2014, Vol. 9, Iss. 2, 83–97 83 http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v9i2.335 DOI: 10.2218/ijdc.v9i2.335 84 | Building Infrastructure for Preservation and Publication doi:10.2218/ijdc.v9i2.335 The NEEShub Platform for Collaboration With the inherent uncertainty surrounding earthquake hazards, and the rate of population growth in urban areas, a critical global challenge is to achieve a level of seismic resilience needed to ensure that communities are safe, sustainable, secure, and economically strong. Since 2004, research conducted at 14 state-of-the-art laboratories distributed throughout the USA has generated a wealth of valuable experimental data resulting in new design techniques, improved construction methods, strategies to improve the resilience of existing infrastructure against earthquakes and tsunamis, and a new paradigm for research collaboration in earthquake engineering (NEES Consortium, 2007; Ramirez, 2012). Among the various stakeholders in NEES, there are four related to NEES Operations: (i) the sponsor, National Science Foundation (NSF); (ii) the NEEScomm Center as the administrative headquarters of the network; (iii) the individual research laboratories and their staff, whose expertise and skills are essential for the successful execution of many innovative and interdisciplinary experimental methods; and (iv) the research community. The venue where these four stakeholders converge is the NEEShub (Hacker et al., 2011) – a collaborative platform based on HUBzero technology (McLennan and Kennell, 2010). A long-standing core goal of the entire NEES effort is that the community of earthquake engineers and practitioners will coalesce around the NEES data repository, the virtual collaborative research environment, state-of-the-art testing capabilities at the laboratories, and the tools to enable visualization, advanced analysis and access to high-performance computing infrastructure. While the NEEShub primarily serves researchers whose projects are funded through NSF’s NEESR program, the repository is open to other relevant engineering research projects that require data management capabilities, whether they are funded through federal or private funding agencies. Currently the strength of the repository is in earthquake and tsunami projects, but data from related engineering fields, such as wind, blast, hurricane, tornado, etc can be accommodated. In just a few years, the NEEShub has established itself as a virtual research environment (Voss and Procter, 2009) that fosters collaboration and provides access to a variety of resources that are of interest to the earthquake engineering community at large. These include tools, theses, articles, educational materials and simulation models. The NEEShub serves as the central US portal for earthquake engineering research data, at this time consisting mainly of the data stored in the NEES data repository, dubbed the Project Warehouse. The NEES Project Warehouse The data in the NEES repository are expected to be of high quality, preservable, and accessible for the long term. To meet these expectations, NEEScomm developed a set of data curation guidelines, workflows and services that facilitate controlled and fast upload of data together with the metadata and documentation necessary for their correct 1 NEEShub: http://www.nees.org/ 2 What is HUBzero? http://hubzero.org/about 3 The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was experimenting with HUBzero platform to house data from the 2010 Chile earthquakes and other disasters. (Litvin and Pujol, 2013) 4 Project Warehouse: http://nees.org/warehouse/welcome IJDC | General Article doi:10.2218/ijdc.v9i2.335 Stanislav Pejša, Shirley Dyke and Thomas Hacker | 85 interpretation, reuse and preservation. The research data in the NEES data repository must conform to best practices for conducting earthquake engineering research, as described in the NEEScomm Guidelines for Data Upload (2012a), and the NEEScomm Requirements for Curation and Archiving of Research Data (2012b). Three types of data are being collected:  Sensor measurements collected from the instrumentation and data acquisition system (DAQ);  Data captured as still images or moving images by installed camera systems;  Required documentation, such as sensor metadata, technical drawings and reports. The NEES data model and metadata schema were developed in the early years of NEES with input from the earthquake engineering research community in years 20042007 (Peng and Law, 2004; Van Den Einde et al., 2008), but they are constantly updated and expanded based on the requirements from the research community. Compliance with the hierarchy of the earthquake engineering research workflow is key for a correct understanding of the research, but it also helps to navigate to the correct location of the data or documentation. The hierarchy (Figure 1) consists of the collection container Project that corresponds to a NSF award; the level of Experiment contains the essential metadata and documentation for a given test; Trial allows for differentiations of different loads or research approaches while working on the same specimen; and finally the data from instruments are stored on the Repetition level. On the Repetition level the data can be further subdivided depending on the type of data processing, allowing for possible verification and more granular reproducibility of the research data. Figure 1. The hierarchy of the research work in the NEES data repository. Functional data management infrastructure, and transparent and predictable workflows are essential for achieving the NEES data goals (NEES, 2011). For efficient data management, the curation requirements must be communicated to the researchers 5 This diagram is available from https://nees.org/topics/NEESProjectDirectoryStructure IJDC | General Article 86 | Building Infrastructure for Preservation and Publication doi:10.2218/ijdc.v9i2.335 early on. While research teams are expected to be familiar with the data archiving requirements, the cyberinfrastructure must facilitate quick, reliable and effective transfer of knowledge. An intuitive interface of the Project Warehouse (Figure 2) assists researchers in the identification of key evidentiary components of the necessary documentation, but also helps to ensure that the pieces of documentation are stored in the proper location. The location also serves as a proxy for metadata of individual pieces of documentation that a researcher would otherwise be required to provide. Figure 2. The tab-driven interface of the web-based editor of the Project Warehouse.