NSF Award
2323175
The X-ray Motion Analysis Portal (XMAPortal) and the Zoological Motion Analysis Portal (ZMAPortal) provides a critical resource for a broad range of faculty and students from diverse institutions including US universities, primarily undergraduate colleges, international institutions, and small businesses. With support from this award, the Portals will be updated to benefit research in the field of comparative biomechanics through; (1) continued availability of video data and metadata already deposited in the Portals; and (2) updating the Portals to receive new data from the growing number of researchers using video to study the biomechanics of movement in living animals. As scientific cyberinfrastructure, the XMAPortal and ZMAPortal provide video data management to increase the efficiency of lab groups and collaborations, and they also serve as data archives for data re-use, validation, and transparency. Undergraduate students will learn about cyberinfrastructure by participating in alpha and beta testing. This project will advance scientific infrastructure and human STEM workforce development in support of scientific innovation and long-term US economic competitiveness.<br/><br/>A cyberinfrastructure update is needed because of external technology changes that have occurred since the development of the XMA and ZMA Portals started nearly 15 years ago. The proposed update will make it possible to continue to sustain the Portals with user fees for the next 15-20 years. The XMA and ZMAPortals will be refactored to leverage the latest modern Javascript web development frameworks. Modern Javascript shifts focus away from specific technologies to user facing functionality, and user experience is decoupled from data. Modern Javascript is less prescriptive about how applications are maintained and deployed, allowing the use of new deployment tools that can dynamically scale with the incoming traffic to the XMAPortal and ZMAPortal. All code will be containerized and deployed with Kubernetes, an open-source container-orchestration tool. The code developed for this project will be open source and available to the scientific community. By updating the technology base of the existing Portals, the continuity of these video data management platforms will be ensured for many years to come. The impact on the research community will be to maintain the video data already stored in the portals while enabling new research in the field of comparative biomechanics through synthesis, data mining, and sharing of highly data-rich video files.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
