Data Warehouse Design to Use Energy and Environmental Data Sources

In 1997, under the umbrella of the Department of Energy's Energy and Environmental Technology Applications Program (EETAP), the University of Southwestern Louisiana (USL) received funding for Information Systems Technology for Energy and Environmental Applications (DE-FG02-97ER12220). There are three partners in the project: the library at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Wetlands Research Center (NWRC), the Center for Advanced Computer Studies (CACS) at USL, and the Regional Applications Center (RAC) located at CACS.

Within this grant, the Energy and Environmental Information Resources (EE-IR) Center was designed to manage and facilitate access to data and information sources pertaining to the Louisiana coast for researchers and by the general public. Users find these kinds of data in a number of different formats, and often the data are offered without application software and in very large files. Users may need to extract only a few years of data from a large data library and are faced with a number of separate databases, each with its own search interface. In addition, users require assistance analyzing the data using software tools not readily available or using analysis such as geographic information systems, database, or statistical application software that needs specialized training or experience. Other problems are text formats that are not compatible or that need a specialized viewer or printer such as Portable Document Format (PDF) or Postscript files.

The research component of the EE-IR Center is provided by CACS. Computer scientists at CACS address technical problems such as innovative ranking issues that discover patterns in the data, ranking algorithms based on user feedback, and data transfer and communications protocols needed between client and server to carry out ranking tasks. In addition, they are addressing the need for automated tools to support knowledge discovery from large data bases based on the type of data mining query, concept-based retrieval, and adaptive retrieval based on relevance feedback. One of the research projects is aimed at moving data from existing data sources into a data warehouse using dimensional modeling and data warehousing tools. Our research methodologies involve retrieval of information from different sources on the web, transformation of the retrieved data, and employing modern methodologies in developing decision support system. The design uses four steps: 1. use image maps to query for information; the image maps provide web access to geographically referenced datasets like wetlands, water quality, and air quality data available on the web. The user is presented with an interactive map, and by choosing the specific location on the map, he/she can query information from the region of his choice. 2. transform the retrieved data. 3. use dimensional modeling techniques to store the queried information with the existing information in the data warehouse. 4. analyze the data using application software , such as decision support and data visualization tools.

To assist users the EE-IR Center supports three librarians and a geographical information specialist at the USGS NWRC library. These librarians collect data and information on Louisiana coastal areas and organize and supply data and information sources in digital format. The data and information sources are described by using national metadata standards and are added to the EE-IR Center Internet resources and databases of materials. In addition, metadata are added to an international bibliographic database, WorldCat, the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, and the National Biological Information Infrastructure servers.

Regional Application Centers were initiated by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Applied Information Sciences Branch. They collect realtime data from NASA satellites at regional institutions and allow users to customize the system for specific applications. Algorithms implemented at each RAC provide a high degree of accuracy in mapping the satellite data to the regional geography within the RAC's service area and will be a source or data used in the EE-IR Center.

A description of the EE-IR Center and EETAP components and listing of metadata collected are available at http://eeirc.nwrc.gov.