National Center for Supercomputing Applications

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

NCSA Brown Dog

DATA TRANSFORMATION SERVICE

Smruti Padhy, Ph.D.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2016 NAGARA ANNUAL CONFERENCE

July 15, 2016, Lansing, MI

The Problem

• Large collections of unstructured and/or un-curated

digital data

• No textual content – Scanned Handwritten Documents,

Satellite/Aerial Photos, Tabular data, Historic Maps, Audios,

Videos

• No consistent or useful naming of files/directories

• No metadata

• Many data types and hundreds of file formats

• Variety of existing software for access and analysis

• Short life span of digital data and software

What we need

A system that

• Enables access to data contents irrespective of file

formats

• Extracts metadata from data content and does

automatic curation – enabling indexing based on the

content and making it searchable

• Uses existing conversion/extraction/data analysis tools

• Is extensible – easily add new tools

• Is dynamically scalable

• Is easy to use – provide uniform interface

Brown Dog Project

• NSF Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) Award

to NCSA ($10.5 M, 2013 -2018)

• Collaboration between NCSA, University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign, University of Maryland, Boston

University, Southern Methodist University

• Leverages prior NCSA/NARA and UMD/NARA funded

work

Brown Dog – Data Transformation Service

• File Format Conversions

• File in, File out

• Example – Image to (Image/text/pdf) format, AutoDesk’s DXF to

(svg, jpg, png, tif, pdf, XML), Video/audio formats(avi, flv, wav, mp3,

mp4) to another video/audio format.

• Can use multiple conversion step

• Metadata Extractions

• Extraction of metadata, signatures or derived products from a file’s

content, tags, previews

• File in, JSON out

• Example – Face extraction from image, text extraction using OCR,

table from pdf, extraction of rivers from historical river maps,

previews

Brown Dog – Data Transformation Service

• Tools Catalog (TC)

• Allows to add new conversion/extraction tools to the Brown Dog

Service

• Highly extensible set of services

• Maintains Provenance

• Auto scaling

• Information loss

OpenCV Face

Extractor

An Example – Conversion and Metadata

Extraction

As seen in the Clowder Web Interface

Tesseract OCR

Extractor

An Example – Conversion and Metadata

Extraction

As seen in the Clowder Web Interface

Conversion

Options

Use Cases Across Many Disciplines

• Biology

• Ecology

• Civil and Environmental Engineering

• Library and Information Science

• Social Science

Lets See Some Examples…

From 19th Century Digitized Historic River

Maps To Study of River Meander

To see the demo and contributors:

http://tinyurl.com/browndog-clients

Census Data

• Extraction of the handwritten contents from each cell of

digitized 1930s census data

Water Bodies Detection from Aerial Photos

To see the demo and contributors:

http://tinyurl.com/browndog-clients

File Manager Extension

• Brown Dog Conversion Service as part of Windows

explorer Right Click Menu

Google’s Chrome Browser Extension

To see the demo :

http://tinyurl.com/browndog-clients

Other Examples …

• Video Analysis Tableau – Cinemetrics Extractors

• Person Tracking from Videos

• Extraction of tables/graphs from pdf when source is not

available

Software Behind …

• Conversion – Polyglot

• Wraps Third-party software/scripts/libraries developed by

researcher

• Intelligently selects conversion path – can chain different software-

minimize conversion hops/information loss

• Imagemagick, Kabeja, Daffodil, ffmpeg, gdal, etc.

• Metadata Extraction - Clowder

• Wraps content analysis/extraction third-party software or scripts

developed by researcher

• NCSA Versus, Siegfried, FITS, Tesseract, OpenCV, Stanford NLP,

ArcGIS etc.

• Provenance Maintenance – DataWolf

• Scalability – Elasticity Module, Cloud (NCSA Nebula), HPC

(XSEDE resource)

Brown Dog Service Demo

Code Snippets

Tools Catalog

Add a Tool

Summary

• Huge diversity in data and analysis tools

• Programmable Interface – various client applications

• Automatically scales up/down

• Place to preserve/reuse software/tools

• Integrates with scientific workflow system

• Reusable modules

Brown Dog Services- Software Components,

Cloud/HPC Resources

Polyglot

Versus Daffodil

Project website:

http://browndog.ncsa.illinois.edu/

Acknowledgements

• The Brown Dog team and collaborators

• This material is based upon work supported by the

National Science Foundation under Grant Number NSF

ACI-1261582: “CIF21 DIBBs: Brown Dog”.

• Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or

recommendations expressed in this material are those of

the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of

the National Science Foundation.

• For More Information :

• Project website: http://browndog.ncsa.illinois.edu/

• Brown Dog Clients:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvaHQKT3BPQ

Thank You

Questions ?

@NCSABrownDog