Data Science for the NOAA Chief Data Officer Dr. Brand Niemann Director and Senior Data Scientist/Data Journalist Semantic Community October 24,

Data Science for NOAA Big Data Build Knowledge Base: – NOAA RFI and Big Industry Day Content Original and New RFI s and Press – Government Data Hubs: Complete catalogue of publicly-available Commerce data sets (DoC 22,365 and NOAA 3,560) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (7 agencies and NOAA has 11) – Discovered 55,602 Data Sets at data.NOAA.gov! Prototype under active development. Availability and completeness are not guaranteed. Also data catalog with 532 data sets at NOAA Climate.gov. Build Spotfire Knowledge Base and Data Ecosystem: – Knowledge Base Indices and Data Set Examples: NOAA Patents and NWS Current Warnings Environmental Research Division's Data Access Program RESTFul Web Services 2

NOAA Big Data Industry Day My Comment: Maybe this is more complicated than it needs to be: – Just appoint a Chief Data Officer like I advised a senior Commerce official to do recently and then there was the announcement soon after This was also my recommendation to Congress in 2012; and/or – Just form a partnership like we did at EPA when I was their data architect/data standards person: My Questions: Focused on the role of data science and data scientists in the NOAA Big Data Program as follows: – Looking at your data assets, I see about 22,00 data sets at Data.gov, about 55,000 in your pilot data catalog, and 3 data hubs at the Open Data Policy GitHub site, which raises four questions: Which is most authoritative? Do you want help with building more data hubs? Who will do the work to make the many different data formats interoperable so data integration is possible? Who will produce the data science data publications called for by OSTP as the “new data currency”? My Comment: The latter is what we are doing for the OSTP NITRD NSF RFI – See: Data Science for the National Big Data R & D InitiativeData Science for the National Big Data R & D Initiative 3

NOAA Site Map 4 Start with NOAA Site Map Looking for Publications and Data

NOAA Publication Sources 5 Found NOAA Central Library But Not Data Science Publications

NOAA Climate.gov: Site Map 6 Found NOAA Climate.gov, and specifically Maps & Data, to be the best content for building a Data Science Publication for the NOAA Chief Data Officer & the Public.

NOAA Climate.gov: Maps & Data 7

NOAA Climate.gov: Global Climate Dashboard 8

NOAA Climate.gov: Integrated Map Application 9

NOAA Climate.gov: Data Catalog Data Sets: 532 Applications: 1 (See Next Slide) Data: 35 Uncategorized: 491! 10

NOAA Climate.gov: Data Catalog Application 11 Web Services: Home Page! (See Data and Publications) Data Access: See Dashboard Metadata: XML Details: Metadata (See Next Slide)

NOAA Climate.gov: Data Catalog Application Metadata 12 Metadata

NOAA Climate.gov: Great Lakes Water Level Dashboard Download Data (See Next Slide) 13

NOAA Climate.gov: Great Lakes Water Level Dashboard Data 14

NOAA Climate.gov: Great Lakes Water Level Dashboard Data Ecosystem GLDData: – Data: hydroIO (11 Folders): – basinWideData (9 spreadsheets), clouds (10 spreadsheets), evap (10 spreadsheets and one folder with 2 text files), flows (20 spreadsheets), nbs (40 spreadsheets and one folder with 5 spreadsheets), PME (10 spreadsheets and one folder with 20 spreadsheets, and a ZIP file with 20 spreadsheets), precip (60 spreadsheets and two folders with 38 and 5 spreadsheets); runoff (20 spreadsheets); sourceSpreadsheets (18 spreadsheets); temps (103 spreadsheets and a folder with 20 spreadsheets and a folder with 20 spreadsheets and 19 text files; and wind( 10 spreadsheets) Ice (7 spreadsheets) Levels (5 folders) longTermForecasts (51 spreadsheets) monthlyForecasts (14 Spreadsheets, 4 text files, and 1 folder with 15 spreadsheets) paleoRecon (4 spreadsheets) – Info: 17 Google Chrome Files 15

Data Science Data Publications for the NOAA Chief Data Officer: Knowledge Base & Spreadsheet 16 Data Science Data Publications for the NOAA Chief Data OfficerData Science Data Publications for the NOAA Chief Data Officer and SpreadsheetSpreadsheet

Data Science Data Publications for the NOAA Chief Data Officer: Spotfire Cover Page 17 Web Player

Data Science Data Publications for the NOAA Chief Data Officer: Spotfire Great Lakes 18 Could add ACE, EPA, USGS, etc. data Web Player

Data Science Data Publications for the NOAA Chief Data Officer: Some Observations Finding NOAA Data and Scientific Publications from the NOAA Web Site Map is not obvious; Most of NOAA's data assets are very large files to be downloaded and are embedded in application tools; NOAA Publication Sources that distribute data and publications are maintain by the Library who are probably not data scientists; The new NOAA Climate.gov site has the best content for Data Science Publications, but there were some difficulties in doing that; The NOAA Climate.gov Data Catalog with 532 data sets is not available as a data set itself and contains only one application (Great Lakes Dashboard) and 35 data sets, with the rest being uncategorized; The Great Lakes Dashboard complete data set can be downloaded as a ZIP file, but contains about 500 individual files that need to be inventoried and matched to their metadata to be used; The NOAA Climate.gov Dashboard is difficult to understand and use with 15 separate indicators of climate change and variability whose data is mostly in text files, except for four that are in spreadsheets. 19

Some Conclusions and Next Steps After the recent NOAA Big Data RFI Industry Day, I provided my suggestions to David McClure, Lead Analyst, Open Government Data Services, Office of the Chief Information Officer, NOAA. That experience led me to think, what would I do if I were the NOAA Chief Data Officer? What questions would I ask and want answered?: – What are NOAA's data assets?; – How can NOAA content be made big data by treating all of its content as data?; – How can data science help NOAA's Big Data effort and the Chief Data Officer?; – What has/will the NOAA RFIs accomplished that I could use in my work going forward? I have answered the four questions by building Data Science Data Publications for the NOAA Chief Data Officer to help him when he is appointed There is still more that I can and will do to help support a NOAA Chief Data Officer. 20