It’s called ArcCI (or Arctic CyberInfrastructure) and promises to combine the thousands of images that have been taken along the years of the Arctic Ocean into one global database that will help scientists and the world see the physical changes occurring in the region including ice loss. The hope is that this web-based repository will allow researchers to spend more time analyzing information rather than just collecting and processing data.
It’s called ArcCI (or Arctic CyberInfrastructure) and promises to combine the thousands of images that have been taken along the years of the Arctic Ocean into one global database that will help scientists and the world see the physical changes occurring in the region including ice loss. The hope is that this web-based repository will allow researchers to spend more time analyzing information rather than just collecting and processing data.
“This is to help scientists spend more time doing the science,” says Professor Alberto Mestas-Nuñez, one of two researchers at UTSA working on the on-demand data mining module. “At present time there isn’t a place on the internet that provides all these datasets but also an algorithm that allows to extract the information,” adds Mestas. “Most of the time scientists spend time getting data and preparing it. Typically, it’s about 80 percent preparing the data and 20 percent doing the actual science. We want to break that paradigm.”
The original idea to build ArcCI came from Professor Hongjie Xie, the principal investigator of the project at UTSA and a professor in the university’s Department of Geological Sciences. Although big data analytics, and dashboards are prevalent in many industries, the technology has yet to be applied fully to monitoring the Arctic’s sea ice.
“We have to harness the data revolution,” says Xie. “It’s about learning more in order to navigate the new Arctic.”
Read more at University of Texas at San Antonio
Image: Hongjie Xie and Alberto Nuñez review some data that will be incorporated into ArcCI. (Credit: UTSA)
