Research Data Alliance Plenary 8 Data Types Registry Mike Finnegan 16 September, 2016
VMC Goals Monitoring Forest health, wildlife, soil, air, and water quality data Collaboration Facilitates collaboration among federal, state, non- profit, professional, and academic institutions Staff scientists to academic researchers Data archive and discovery to conserve and manage forested landscapes to identify and monitor threats to forest health and function
Current DBMS Projects Highest level (Solar Radiation Project) Datasets Belong to a project (Northern VT – 2016 Field Season) Fields Belong to a dataset (Timestamp, Name, SW Radiation) Fields Metadata Adhere to Ecological Metadata Language (EML) standards Lack syntactic meaning
Web Portal CMS
Corporation for National Research Initiatives enrich.cordra.org Grant from MacArthur Foundation > RDA > VMC Enrich DTR Added 250 entries Units (eg: Degrees Celsius) Concepts (eg: Temperature) VMC Database Associated 2000+ fields with DTR
Benefits Dataset discovery and traversal Done at Data Type level Previously only done with Keywords and People Standardization Unit and Concept definition Transformations Speling (sp?) More rigorous and nuanced than EML Multidisciplinary application Concept of Flow (both atmospheric and water chemistry)
Challenges Dimensionless Concepts and Related Functions Count (Trees in a plot) Meaningful DTR Entries Km/hr vs. picometers/nanominute Adding new DTR Entries Governance of the DTR
Future Work Recommendation System More robust dataset similarity model Improved User Interface Determine Governance Methodology Generic Dimensionless Concept Solution
Thank You MacArthur Foundation RDA Fran Berman, Larry Lannom, and Giridhar Manepalli