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Cyber-Infrastructure for Transformational Scientific Discovery in Arkansas and West Virginia (CI-TRAIN)

 

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Project Overview

This large project involves a partnership between a number of universities in Arkansas (AR) and West Virginia (WV) and builds on common research in geosciences, virtual environments, and computational sciences while leveraging technical expertise within the two states: WV leverages expertise in the deployment and operation of shared high performance computing resources while AR leverages expertise in visualization and modeling. This consortium seeks to create a nationally competitive computation and visualization environment; to provide visualization display devices at each partnering institution; and to procure a suite of hardware and software for data capture and content creation that can enable a broad range of research and education activities across several science and engineering domains. The consortium seeks to build the needed cyber-infrastructure to advance the frontiers of knowledge in several scientific domains, and to transform information technology services for enabling discovery and innovation. 

Of the total UA NSF award (UA Investigators:  Amy Apon, Fred Limp, Laurent Bellaiche, Srinivassan Ramaswamy, Douglas Spearot), a sub-award was made to the Center with Jack Cothren as PI. In addition, ASTA provided the UA with first year partial match, some of which was awarded to CAST. In the sub-award the Center has focused on geo-visualization, GIS, and infrastructure and community modeling.  As part of the project the Center has acquired a number of state-of-the-art data acquisition systems including three scanning systems (Leica C10, Z+F 5006i and Breuckmann smartSCAN Color HE). In addition the grant supported acquisition of three survey grade GPS systems (Leica G15s).  These instruments have already been used in a number of major research applications in many locations around the world.  The primary areas of application have been heritage recordation methods and in the development of new approaches to the recordation and analysis of urban infrastructure. The UA campus and local area (Fayetteville and Bentonville) have served as the test-sites for the development of new methodologies.  

Data acquired by laser scanners are unorganized and a key issue is the ways in which these data can be processed into meaningful information. A related research question is the structuring of the data and related metadata to allow for effective retrieval and re-use.

On the UA Campus the Center has partnered with UA Facilities Management to use the UA campus as a real-world laboratory for development of new approaches. One project involved the assessment of data resolution and technical methods for the acquisition of as-built data for a complex structure – using the UA chiller plant as the test case.  A key question was the relationship of data resolution and semantic element extraction. Some of the data from this project are shown here.

In the US heritage projects have included pre-Columbian archaeological sites in Defiance Cave in Glenn Canyon National Recreation Area and in Chaco Canyon National Historic Park while outside the US research projects have included Eleusis Archaeological Site, Athens Greece; Villia Stabia outside Naples Italy; Karanis,  Greece; Sardonic Harbors Archaeological Research Project, Korphos, Greece; Temple of Poseidon, Sounion, Greece; Porto Rafti, Greece; Epigraphical Museum, Athens, Greece; Ancient Agora, Athens, Greece and El Zotz, Guatemala.

A project combining both heritage and urban infrastructure elements is the cooperative work between the Center and FAMA relating to the renovation of Vol Walker. High resolution interior and exterior scanning will be used to document the historic fabric of the structure as well as provide  a new approach to the development of detailed as-built documentation. The importance of new technologies for the creation of as-built documentation, showing changes that were made during construction to the original architectural plans, is a important research direction in the building industry.

In an effort to capture the considerable experience and skill required to effectively use this large number of instruments and software, CAST has developed an interactive, on-line collections of workflows, tutorials and data samples designed to serve as a resource for University of Arkansas researchers, not-for-profit organizations and industry.