GCJ: Can you please tell us about SAFORAH, what it is, and how it works?

Goodenough: A large amount of earth observation data (EO) data is collected by the Canadian Forest Service (CFS), Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), and stored at various locations across the country. The System of Agents for Forest Observation Research with Advanced Hierarchies (SAFORAH) is a grid-enabled environment that makes optimum use of distributed data storage facilities and boosts research productivity, reliability and efficiency within the Canadian government and partnering scientific institutions. SAFORAH was built with an extensible data grid network based on Globus Toolkit 4.0 (GT-4) and transparently presents the distributed data storage facilities across multiple organizations and government agencies as one single data archive to facilitate easy EO data archiving and distribution. One of the SAFORAH components on top of the Grid layer way is MacDonald Dettwiler's (MDA) Catalogue and User Data Ordering System (CUDOS), used as a web portal to the SAFORAH data grid. CUDOS uses the pre-WS components of GT-4 for grid job submission and data transfer between distributed data storage facilities. Another portal to the data grid will be a grid-enabled OGC Web services system. It will provide standard OGC Web services interfaces to users and other OGC enabled geospatial information systems. The actual services implementation is based on the Web Service Resource Frame Work (WSRF) and implemented in the GT-4 environment, including the Grid-enabled Web Map Service (GWMS), Grid-enabled Web Coverage Service (GWCS), Grid-enabled Catalog Service for Web (GCSW) and Control Grid Service (CGS). These Web services can work either independently or collaboratively. Currently, four Canadian Forestry Centres located in Victoria British Columbia, Cornerbrook Newfoundland, Edmonton Alberta, and Quebec City and Environment Canada's Canadian Wildlife Service in Ottawa are operationally connected to the SAFORAH data grid. The connection to a large petabyte storage facility under development at the University of Victoria (UVic) was also established. SAFORAH has been used in CFS's national programs to support the national monitoring of Canada's forests.

GCJ: Who are your partners in the SAFORAH project and what are some of the benefits they have seen from participating?

Goodenough: Participating Partners in SAFORAH are:

• Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)
• Canadian Space Agency (CSA)
• BC Common Information Technology Services (CITS)
• MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA)
• University of Victoria (UVic)
• GeoConnections
• Environment Canada (EC)
• Laboratory for Advanced Information and Technology Standards (LAITS) of George Mason University (GMU)
• Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC)
• Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI)

The Canadian Forest Service of Natural Resources Canada is the primary beneficiary of SAFORAH and its data holdings. These holdings include Landsat coverages of Canada for 1990 and 2000, and EOSD-created land cover, change, and biomass products. EOSD or Earth Observation for Sustainable Development is a national forest monitoring project. SAFORAH provides easy access to these data and products resulting in savings in time, infrastructure duplication, and improvements in public awareness of CFS contributions to the sustainability of Canada's forests. SAFORAH's public data and products are disseminated openly and freely to the world. SAFORAH is also used for other CFS projects involving remote sensing, and thus includes airborne and satellite radar and hyperspectral data. The departments and agencies within the Government of Canada are also beneficiaries of SAFORH with EO data sharing, computing resources sharing and derived information products distribution. Some partners seek to address issues such as Grid architecture, high performance computing and distributed data storage facilities.

GCJ: Would you speak a bit about your funding model and where your operating budget comes from? Is it mainly grant based or do you have corporate funding as well?

Goodenough: The SAFORAH project was funded by NRCan, Canadian Space Agency and GeoConnections, and supported by our collaborating partners listed above. The goal is to support Canadian interdepartmental and agency collaboration for large national projects in sustainable development of Canada's forests. We provide practical tools and CGDI-endorsed Web services for computing resource sharing, distributed data management, secured data transfer and easy public access. The project is also supported by the strong partnership. UVic provides SAFORAH access to the CFI-funded petabyte data storage. CITS helped CFS to build a direct fibre link from the Pacific Forestry Centre to a BCNet Transit Exchange in Victoria and from there it is being linked to the CANARIE fibre backbone across Canada. MDA developed CUDOS and has been a contractor for CUDOS upgrade and support. GMU provided software support for the implementation of the Grid-enabled OGC Web services for SAFORAH.

GCJ: Can you describe some of the applications that use your distributed data storage grid?

Goodenough: The research and development of SAFORAH provides direct support to collaborative research of national programs within the Canadian government. One the applications is the Earth Observation for Sustainable Development (EOSD) of Forests, a joint program between NRCan CFS and CSA for the development of a forest monitoring system for Canada. EOSD used up to 1700 Landsat TM/ETM+ images, shared through the SAFORAH data grid within four Canadian Forestry Centres (Pacific Forestry Centre, Victoria British Columbia; Atlantic Forestry Centre, Cornerbrook Newfoundland; Northern Forestry Centre, Edmonton Alberta; Laurentian Forestry Centre, Quebec), to develop forest information products, such as the national maps of forest landcover, forest change over time and forest biomass. All of the Landsat (TM/ETM+) images and derived EOSD information products are accessible freely by public users through SAFORAH CUDOS and later OGC Web interfaces. Now, many Canadian provincial and territorial mapping agencies have recognized the importance of such mapping and have initiated mapping programs of their own by utilizing Landsat data and EOSD Landcover images.

GCJ: From late last year there has been an underlying migration and deconstruction from the term grid to component terms such as virtualization and SOA. How do you perceive those technologies fitting into the SAFORAH mix?

Goodenough: The initial implementation of the SAFORAH data grid to achieve EO data sharing and research collaboration in a virtual organization (VO) environment was based on the pre-WS Globus Toolkit technologies (GT-2). In order to increase the exposure of the comprehensive EO data in SAFORAH, we are now in a stage of building the Grid-enabled OGC Web services with the Globus Toolkit service-oriented technologies (GT-4). The new implementation of the grid-enabled OGC services will allow SAFORAH to contribute to the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) by publishing the EO data through the OGC standard-compliant interfaces in a grid-service-oriented computing environment. Moreover, the service-oriented architecture also allows the SAFORAH grid services securely invoking or being invoked by any other grid services from any other authorized grid systems (VOs).

GCJ: With such a mass collection of data and wide range of groups accessing it, standards must be very important part of the SAFORAH project.

Goodenough: SAFORAH utilizes two standards for remote sensing data: FGDC standards (US Federal Geographic Data Committee), and OGC (Open GIS Consortium) standards. Remote sensing images can be large files and have associated files for calibration and sensor attributes. Data in SAFORAH is accessed through user-specification of search parameters. For rapid, efficient dissemination of remote sensing data, images are grouped (tarred) with their related files. The user specifies which group or sets of groups of files are wanted. For large volume transfers, the user selects the CUDOS portal for data access. The majority of SAFORAH data are stored in UVic's petabyte data store. The metadata catalog is stored at PFC. Users do not need to know the physical structure of SAFORAH to operate and easily access data.

GCJ: Tell us a bit about the team that is responsible for the SAFORAH project?

Goodenough: The leader of the UVic data store development is Dr. Randy Sobie of the Department of Physics. I myself am the Principal Investigator for the SAFORAH Project. Mr. Hao Chen of PFC is a Co-I and the Technical Lead for the SAFORAH implementation. Mrs. Aimin Guan is a PFC physical scientist implementing the OGC services. Mr. Richard Matthews of MDA led the implementation of CUDOS for SAFORAH. Dr. Liping Di is a leader of development of the NASA Web GIS Software Suite on the Grid-enabled OGC Web Services and software implementation. Mr. Graham Hicks of BC CITS initially developed the communications linkages between PFC, UVic, and Canarie. The SAFORAH project is conducted through the Forest Information Division of the Pacific Forestry Centre. The Director of the Forest Information Division is Mr. Jeff Dechka. The Director-General of the Pacific Forestry Centre is Ms. Sue Farlinger.

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