About OMS

The Object Modeling System (OMS) is a framework for designing, building, validating, and deploying agro-environmental models. It contains four platforms:

  1. Model development (model creation, calibration, simulation, and analysis console)
  2. Model deployment (models and data as web services scaled to a cloud infrastructure)
  3. Data provisioning (soil, climate, land management operations)
  4. Knowledge base (model component library, component metadata)

With OMS, modelers can:

  • Create science components without framework boilerplate intruding on the source code
  • Add simple annotations to components to enable linkage into compound components and models
  • Apply a unit test harness to verify component function and performance
  • Obtain previously developed components from the OMS component library
  • Connect components developed in Java, Fortran, C, and other languages to create models
  • Automatically generate component and model documentation, always in sync with source code
  • Create model simulations for verification testing, calibration, validation, and analysis, including:
    • o LUCA calibration (shuffled complex evolution)
    • o DDS (Dynamically Dimensional Search) calibration
    • o FAST (extended Fourier Amplitude Sensitivity Test) sensitivity analysis
    • o Morris sensitivity analysis
    • o Sobol sensitivity analysis
    • o NSGA (Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm) uncertainty analysis
    • o GLUE (Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation)
    • o Bayesian Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis.

OMS is lightweight, open, less invasive, and more flexible than other environmental modeling frameworks.  Modeling communities can use OMS directly or create their own modeling systems incorporating OMS components.

With the OMS deployment platform, an agency or company information technology (IT) organization can:

  • Integrate validated science models and components into their business application systems and workflows
  • Use the OMS cloud services platform to run models to run as services scaled to heavy user load
  • Provision data to models through OMS data access services.

OMS is rooted in broad interest in modular modeling that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s among federal agencies and other organizations involved with natural resource management.  CSU and ARS, supported by NRCS and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) began work to develop OMS in 2000.  The first version was released in 2004, followed by the second version in 2008.  With the 2010 release as OMS3, the framework was streamlined to make it as lightweight as possible and extended to include deployment as model and data services on cloud platforms.  Future plans include model service support for mobile computing and an OMS model component ontology to facilitate the model creation process.  Click on the Collaborations tab to read more about progress with OMS to date.