Abstract:
OpenTopography facilitates community access to high-resolution, Earth science-oriented, topography data, and related tools and resources.
The mission of the OpenTopography Facility is to:
- Democratize online access to high-resolution (meter to sub-meter scale), Earth science-oriented, topography data acquired with LiDAR and other technologies.
- Harness cutting edge cyberinfrastructure to
... provide Web service-based data access, processing, and analysis capabilities that are scalable, extensible, and innovative.
- Promote discovery of data and software tools through community populated metadata catalogs.
- Partner with public domain data holders to leverage OpenTopography infrastructure for data discovery, hosting and processing.
- Provide professional training and expert guidance in data management, processing, and analysis.
- Foster interaction and knowledge exchange in the Earth science LiDAR user community.
The OpenTopography Facility is based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego and is operated in collaboration with colleagues in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. Core operational support for OpenTopography comes from the National Science Foundation Earth Sciences: Instrumentation and Facilities Program (EAR/IF) and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure. In addition, we receive funding from the NSF and NASA to support various OpenTopography related research and development activities. OpenTopography was initially developed as a proof of concept cyberinfrastructure in the Earth sciences project as part of the NSF Information and Technology Research (ITR) program-funded Geoscience Network (GEON) project. 
