CHORDS Provides Infrastructure for Data Services

CHORDS Provides Next Generation Infrastructure for Real-time Geoscience Data Services

  • GPS station with Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano in the background.
    A continuous GPS station at Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano, Tanzania. (Photo/D. Sarah Stamps, Virginia Tech)
  • CHORDS workflow illustration, showing incoming data from instruments processed with HTML to monitor and manage data with the software. The information is then outputted to users in the forms of services, programs, and files.
    The CHORDS workflow: Making data more accessible. (Image/D. Sarah Stamps, Virginia Tech)

Overview

The EarthCube Cloud-Hosted Real-time Data Services for the Geosciences (CHORDS) project aims to simplify access to real-time geoscience data. Through CHORDS portals, scientists can visualize data streams: (1) in samples/min/hour/day, (2) as simple time-series, and (3) via the time-series visualization software Grafana for real-time time-series analysis. Currently the project supports several successful use-cases and is open to accepting more, particularly from the UNAVCO real-time GNSS community. Co-PI D. Sarah Stamps and her team have developed two brokers that transfer real-time GNSS data streams from UNAVCO into CHORDS portals (gnss2chords.sh and gnss2chords.py). These two brokering programs are available through the CHORDS GitHub webpage.

UNAVCO is supporting the CHORDS project in several ways. UNAVCO receives real-time GNSS data streams from the Tanzania Volcano Observatory (TZVOLCANO) use-case. UNAVCO also archives the real-time data and makes NMEA strings available that have longitude, latitude, and height information through their real-time data streaming service. Anyone using UNAVCO real-time services has access to the TZVOLCANO GNSS streaming data as well as all other real-time stations. Users can access any real-time GNSS data stream using the brokers mentioned above or through their own programs that can easily be developed using URLs.

A chief goal of CHORDS is to make real-time data streams easily accessible and to assist data providers in exposing their data to a broader community. CHORDS adheres to standards as they are available and connects with the EarthCube “Project 418” data discovery mechanism to allow these streams to be indexed by Google’s Dataset Search tool. For more information please contact PI Mike Daniels at daniels@ucar.edu.

doi: Daniels, M. D., Kerkez, B., Chandrasekar, V., Graves, S., Stamps, D. S., Martin, C., Botnick, A., Gooch, R., Bartos, M., Jones, J., Keiser, K. (2016). Cloud-Hosted Real-time Data Services for the Geosciences (CHORDS) software (Version 0.9.9). UCAR/NCAR – EarthCube. https://doi.org/10.5065/d6v1236q

Project Information

Principle Investigator(s): Mike Daniels, D. Sarah Stamps, Branko Kerkez, Venkatchalam Chandrasekar, Sara Graves
UNAVCO staff: Dave Mencin, Chuck Meertens
Location: Ol Doinyo Legai, Tanzania (map)
Funding Source: NSF EarthCube Building Blocks

Related Links

This Community Highlight features the work of UNAVCO community members’ efforts to increase access to, use of, and innovation within geodesy. If there is an effort you would like to see highlighted here, please get in touch with us at community@unavco.org.

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