Announcing the Spring 2014 Testbed Projects

In late February, the 2014 Testbed Request for Proposals(http://testbed.esipfed.org/node/2290) was released to the ESIP community. The RFP provides funding and other support to small, innovative and collaborative projects that benefit the ESIP community through the ESIP Testbed.

The ESIP Testbed is a forum open to all sectors of the ESIP Federation to develop, test, and improve ideas, research, products, and services.  The Testbed is intended to offer a unified environment to gain consensus on community best practices and technological advances. Projects live in the Testbed for a short while, receive feedback from the ESIP community, spark new research, benefits, or ideas in the science data community, and then move on to either live in a more long-term ‘home' or are archived with their lessons-learned.

There have been many past ESIP Testbed projects (http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Past_Testbed_Tasks). And this Spring, three new projects will join the ranks*, each funded at $6,500:

1. Evaluating the ESIP Ontologies for Mapping and Reconciliation – Michael Huhns, Line Pouchard. This project will develop a semi‐automated means for curating ontologies and reconciling their representations. The result will be greatly improved accessibility and usability of the ontologies, which will help to accelerate research in environmental sciences.
2. ToolMatch Service Testbed Project – Christopher Lynnes, Nancy Hoebelheinrich, Patrick West, Matthew Ferritto, David Bassendine. This project will develop out the ToolMatch service such that the science community can discover what tools can be used on a dataset, and the converse – what datasets a tool is capable of working upon.
3. Cyberinfrastructure Prototype Inventory – Danie Kinkade, Steve Diggs, Bob Arko, Cynthia Chandler, Adam Shepherd. This project will yield a catalog consisting of existing cyberinfrastructure prototype tools, components and technologies, supported by data-driven use cases that can communicate successes and failures, and the transformative potential of each prototype. It is envisioned that this inventory will be compatible with the ToolMatch schema such that the two projects enrich one another.

Congratulations to all the collaborators on these projects! The project progress will be further presented at the ESIP Summer Meeting in their supporting cluster sessions.  Keep an eye out for opportunities to participate in the project research, give feedback, or use their resulting tools and data. We can't wait to see what these projects discover, enable, and connect.

If you missed submitting for this round but want to get in on the Testbed goodness, mark your calendar for the next Testbed RFP – deadline will be October 30, 2014 and we'll start talking about it post-Summer Meeting.

* The project summaries here are very summarized.  Each funded project will be creating a documentation page on the testbed.esip.org site to more fully describe the goals and benefits of their project.