Beginning of my GSOC Journey!
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Google Summer of Code is one of the best things that has happened to me. It has exposed me to the culture of open source and has given me a chance to be a part of amazing communities like Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), Pyviz and Intake. I am really amazed by looking at eagerness and willingness of communities to help the newcomers and each other in general. Now I feel that open source is really a gift to the entire technical community all over the world so more and more people should learn about it and come forward to cherish it. GSOC is like a journey, where you learn by working with your mentors and community, enhance your skills and emerge out on the other side as a better person. I am thrilled to have undertaken this journey!
I have been selected in the organisation Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) under member organisation US Geological Survey. My mentors for this project are Rich Signell, a research oceanographer at the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole and Martin Durant a data scientist and software engineer at Anaconda, inc.
Our project aims to create a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for big gridded geospatial data visualization in the browser interface backed by the full power of the Python ecosystem. This GUI would allow controlled data points selection, massive rendering, data display, custom interaction, selection of fields for plotting and layout of widgets in the browser using Intake, Xarray and Pyviz collection of tools. Currently majority of geospatial data exploration happens in stand-alone applications like Panoply and NcView , tools that have limited functionality, do not provide complex analysis methods and can only be reasonably extended by the software developers on those projects. This new tool, written in Python, but presented as a dashboard in the notebook environment, will be extendable directly by researchers by using it in conjunction with tools like Dask and will also provide complex analysis methods on the data being visualized. It holds the promise of saving Earth Science and other researchers significant amounts of time since they can directly focus on visual data analysis and research rather than writing custom code to explore data. It will also facilitate interactive browsing of the increasingly large collection of gridded data on the cloud, which will also strongly benefit researchers.
There are several reasons behind choosing this project. I have always been passionate about data visualisation. Besides developing a valuable tool for the community, this project will give me the opportunity to significantly improve my data visualisation skills. I believe Pyviz will advance to the front of the pack of Python visualization tools, and I amexcited to both benefit from and help improve this effort. The culture of the Pyviz community is a supportive one, and I look forward to share my findings and challenges with this community. Through my initial exploration of this project, I have become interested in the computational challenges facing the Earth Science community. This project is also an opportunity for me to learn more about geoinformatics. I am also more thrilled by the fact that this GUI, would be used by the entire Earth Science community and other researchers. It will aid their scientific workflows. I promise to give it the best I have to make this project successful. I greatly appreciate the chance Google and ESIP have provided.
Being the Head of Technical Team in my university, I organised CESS Summer of Code (CSOC) with the help of my team, as a token of thanks and gratitude to Google and open source community. CSOC aims to bring more new student developers into open source culture. It exposes them to the culture of open source and is on similar guidelines as GSOC. More information about CSOC could be found here.
I am looking forward to learn more, exploit my potential and capabilities to the fullest and give my best during this journey!
If you have any ideas or questions regarding this project please feel free to discuss in this Gitter channel.