GS3: A Knowledge Management Architecture for Collaborative Geologic Sequestration Modeling

Modern scientific enterprises are inherently knowledge-intensive. In general, scientific studies in domains such as geoscience, chemistry, physics and biology require the acquisition and manipulation of large amounts of experimental and field data in order to create inputs for large-scale computational simulations. The results of these simulations must then be analyzed, leading to refinements of inputs and models and further simulations. In this paper we describe our efforts in creating a knowledge management platform to support collaborative, wide-scale studies in the area of geologic sequestration modeling. The platform, known as GS3 (Geologic Sequestration Software Suite), exploits and integrates off-the-shelf software components including semantic wikis, content management systems and open source middleware to create the core architecture. We then extend the wiki environment to support the capture of provenance, the ability to incorporate various analysis tools, and the ability to launch simulations on supercomputers. The paper describes the key components of GS3 and demonstrates its use through illustrative examples. We conclude by assessing the suitability of our approach for geologic sequestration modeling and generalization to other scientific problem domains.