- Alfred-Wegener-Institut - Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung
Introduction
MOSAiC (https://mosaic-expedition.org/) has been the largest polar expedition in history. The German icebreaker Polarstern was trapped in the ice from October 2019 to October 2020, and rich data have been collected during the polar year. The M-VRE project (The MOSAiC Virtual Research Environment, https://mosaic-vre.org/) has the aim to support the analysis and exploitation of the MOSAiC data by providing online software tools for the easy, interdisciplinary and efficient exploration and visualization of the data. One service provided by M-VRE is webODV, the online version of the Ocean Data View Software (ODV, https://odv.awi.de/).
Setup
The MOSAiC webODV is available via https://mosaic-vre.org/services/ or dirctly at https://mvre.webodv.cloud.awi.de/. Due to a moratorium until the end of 2022, the data can only be accessed by the MOSAiC consortium. From 2023 on, MOSAiC data and thus webODV will be available for the science community and the general public. In the webODV configuration, datasets as well as the ODV software reside and run on a server machine, not on the client computer. The browser client communicates with the server over the Internet using secure websockets. Up to now we provide two webODV services, which are described in the following.
Data Extraction
The Data Extraction service is based on intuitive web elements like buttons, dropdowns, date widgets and a drag & drop zoom function for the map. The aim is to provide data sub-setting as easy and fast as possible. A pager on the top of the site guides the user through the pages, which includes mainly the selection of stations, variables and finally the download function. Data can be finely granulated selected e.g. by zooming into the map, defining time windows and restrictions to specific variables. Finally the selected data can be downloaded as text files, ODV collections or netCDF files for later use with the standalone ODV or other tools.
Data Exploration
The Data Exploration service or ODV-online aims to provide the look-and-feel and functionality of the desktop ODV in the browser window for creating maps, surface plots, section plots, scatter plots, filtering data etc. Here the browser window resembles the ODV desktop application window consisting of canvas with station map and data windows and metadata, sample data and isosurface value lists on the right side. As in the desktop ODV, left mouse clicks on stations or data points select these items. Right-clicks bring up context menus providing the familiar ODV functionality. Users can download image files of the entire canvas or individual windows and can export the data of the current station set or of individual data windows.
Data provider traceability
A “cite” button has been implemented, which provides all dataset DOIs or citations (.txt, .bib or .ris) involved in the current visualization.
Reproducibility
Analyses and visualizations which have been created with ODV-online can be saved as so-called xviews, which are essentially XML files, which include instructions for ODV to create visualizations. Via our xview manager users can download, upload and delete personal xviews. These files can be used to fully reproduce the analyses and visualizations and can be shared e.g. with colleagues. Additionally, the xview files can be added e.g. as supplementary material to publications, and together with the link to the MOSAiC data collection in webODV, provide full reproducibility.
Sharing
A quick share functionality has been implemented, i.e. a link to a visualization, which can be retrieved by a single click and send to a colleague and is valid for 72h. If a colleague opens the link in the browser he/she is immediately send to the just created visualization to quickly discuss e.g. important findings or to continue own research.