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“Simons CMAP: Harmonized global ocean data portal for multidisciplinary analysis”

Abstract: Simons Collaborative Marine Atlas Project (Simons CMAP) is an open-source data portal that unifies and interconnects large, complex, and heterogenous public data sets currently dispersed in different formats across different Oceanography discipline-specific databases. It offers a set of standard APIs to access, search, and integrate various data sources, thus expanding the power of these potentially underutilized data sets for cross-disciplinary studies of ocean processes. Simons CMAP provides a unified data architecture that allows numerical model outputs, remote sensing data products, and field observations to be readily shared, mined, and integrated regardless of data set size or resolution. Our ever-growing database is approaching 100TB in size which is an immediate result of collaborative efforts between ~30 international universities and institutions specialized in marine biology, biogeochemical oceanography, and numerical marine ecology. A current focus of Simons CMAP is the integration of physical, chemical, and biological data sets essential for characterizing the biogeography of key marine microbes across ocean basins and seasonal cycles. Production of a unifying data platform for such a large group of scientists with diverse interests and skill sets poses intriguing opportunities and challenges. In this presentation, I discuss our achievements and challenges in the design, implementation, and maintenance of a large global FAIR-oriented marine data portal.

Biography: Mohammad is a principal research scientist at the University of Washington, School of Oceanography where he’s the project lead of the Simons CMAP data portal. He did his PhD in Physics at Simon Fraser University and CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) studying matter-antimatter asymmetry. He did his Postdoc at MIT (Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences) working on the ocean surface current turbulence models. While at MIT, he started developing a software stack to unify and integrate ocean datasets; a project that formed the foundations of the Simons CMAP data portal, supported by the Simons Foundations.

The UW Data Science Seminar is an annual lecture series at the University of Washington that hosts scholars working across applied areas of data science, such as the sciences, engineering, humanities and arts along with methodological areas in data science, such as computer science, applied math and statistics. Our presenters come from all domain fields and include occasional external speakers from regional partners, governmental agencies and industry.

The 2022-2023 seminars will be virtual, and are free and open to the public.