Merging web 2.0 technologies with cloud-based web services to address ocean and coastal geospatial applications

A number of rapidly evolving ocean observing initiatives including NOAA's Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) and NSF's Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) are focused on the integration of disparate time-varying geospatial data collected by satellites, in-situ measuring devices, radar, with data generated by numerical models. This paper studies the use of a wide variety of opensource tools used in the metocean community and how these tools can be integrated with Web 2.0 technologies such as Google Search to allow users to publish and discover metocean science data. Once discovered, the real challenge is true interoperability of different data, even though the data is delivered with open standards, in most cases OGC standards. The authors will look at the challenges faced with correct implementation of the standards and practical limitations of the standards for operational mission- critical applications. The authors will present a prototype tool that leverages a number of OGC standards to deliver high speed access to time-varying data, and will provide conclusions on the use of the cloud to host these services.