ObsDB: A System for Uniformly Storing and Querying Heterogeneous Observational Data

Earth and environmental scientists collect and use a wide range of observational data. This data often exhibits high structural and semantic heterogeneity due to the variety of data collected and the ways in which observational datasets are structured in practice. However, to address questions at broad temporal, geographic, and biological scales, researchers often need to access and combine data from many observational datasets. This paper presents a system called ObsDB that helps to address these challenges by providing an integrated environment for storing, querying, and analyzing heterogeneous data based on a semantic observational model. The model allows for ontology-based descriptions of observational datasets and provides a common representation for storing observational data. The obsdb system is built on top of standard relational database technology and provides a declarative query language for accessing observations. Integrated support is also provided for exploratory data analysis, allowing users to call analytical scripts created using the R system over stored observational data.