Integrating marine observatories into a system-of-systems: Messaging in the US Ocean Observatories Initiative

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) will implement ocean sensor networks covering a diversity of oceanic environments, ranging from the coastal to the deep ocean. Construction will begin in Fall 2009, with deployment phased over five years. The integrating feature of the OOI is a comprehensive Cyberinfrastructure (CI), whose design is based on loosely-coupled distributed services, and whose elements are expected to reside throughout the physical components; from seafloor instruments to autonomous vehicles to deep sea moorings to shore facilities to computing and storage infrastructure. The OOI-CI provides novel capabilities for data acquisition, distribution, modeling, planning and interactive control of oceanographic experiments. The architecture comprises six subsystems: four elements address the oceanographic science- and education-driven operations of the OOI integrated observatory, and two elements provide core infrastructure services for the distributed, message-based, service-oriented integration and communication infrastructure, as well as the virtualization of computational and storage resources. All OOI functional capabilities and resources represent themselves as services to the observatory network, with precisely defined service access protocols based on message exchange. This paper presents an overview of the OOI services and focuses on the strategy for service-oriented integration and the publish-subscribe model for communication.