About
The Object Modeling System (OMS) was jointly developed by the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS), USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), and Colorado State University (CSU), also with support from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). OMS is an open source framework for designing, building, validating, deploying, and supporting agro-environmental models.
Responding to increased interest in OMS beyond the founding agencies, the CSU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CSU-CEE) in July 2011 established the OMS Laboratory (OMSLab) to support modeling communities using OMS, facilitate interaction among communities, and coordinate enhancements to the framework. A primary goal is to help increase and optimize science-based decision-making for agricultural and natural resource management.
During 2015 OMSLab became the software and database development arm of the CSU One Water Solutions Institute, combining resources with the Integrated Decision Support team, and relocating to the CSU Foothills Campus.
OMSLab provides ways to collaboratively:
- Maintain and enhance the OMS framework
- Conduct research to develop new modeling technologies
- Contribute to and maintain an open source repository of models, components, data, and metadata including a knowledge base to understand and access the content of the repository
- Apply quality assurance to model components
- Deploy models as services in data centers, including cloud platforms
- Develop data and data access services for OMS models and model services
- Develop education and training materials
- Leverage and exchange knowledge and expertise across modeling communities
