Ocean science has long been the franchise of individuals or small groups of scientists working to solve problems within a single science domain at a time. However, the broad scientific and civil demands for multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research coupled with exponential growth in information technology are irrevocably changing oceanography.

The US National Science Foundation is initiating a transformation of ocean science with the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). The OOI is designed to provide new, persistent, interactive capabilities for ocean science, and has a global physical observatory footprint (Fig. 1). Two implementing organizations (IOs) have been constituted to construct the Regional Scale Nodes (RSN) and Coastal/Global Scale Nodes (CGSN) comprising cabled and multiple buoyed observatories, respectively.

Figure 1: Location map for the OOI marine infrastructure

The OOI CyberInfrastructure (CI) constitutes the integrating element that links and binds the physical infrastructure into a coherent system-of-systems, and is being constructed by a third IO. The core capabilities and the principal objectives of the OOI are collecting real-time data, analyzing data and modeling the ocean on multiple scales and enabling adaptive experimentation within the ocean. A traditional data-centric CI, in which a central data management system ingests data and serves them to users on a query basis, is not sufficient to accomplish the range of tasks ocean scientists will engage in when the OOI is implemented. Instead, a highly distributed set of capabilities are required that facilitate:

• End-to-end data preservation and access,
• End-to-end, human-to-machine and machine-to-machine control of how data are collected and analyzed,
• Direct, closed loop interaction of models with the data acquisition process,
• Virtual collaborations created on demand to drive data-model coupling and share ocean observatory resources (e.g., instruments, networks, computing, storage and workflows),
• End-to-end preservation of the ocean observatory process and its outcomes, and
• Automation of the planning and prosecution of observational programs.

In addition to these features, the CI must provide the background messaging, governance and service frameworks that facilitate interaction in a shared environment, similar to the role of the operating system on a computer.

From the outset, the OOI CI was designed to implement a set of activities derived from a process model that structures their interaction and compartmentalization (Fig. 2). The model supports the real-time coupling and aggregation of the main observe, model and exploit activities as well as their respective sub-activities.

Figure 2: Scientific process model for ocean observatory activities

The observe activity constitutes the data collection strategy that lies at the core of scientific investigation. The outcome is a set of observational products such as data or quantities derived from them that serve as the input to a model activity. The result of modeling is a set of derived products that yield an interpretation of the data and the processes that determine them. Based on this improved understanding of the underlying physics, chemistry and biology, the exploit activity is used to plan, simulate and execute additional observation activities. The entire scientific process operates as a closed rather than an open loop, with or without a human in the loop.