Best Practices

Increasing attention is being paid to the importance of proper scientific data management and implementing processes that ensure that products being released are properly documented. USGS policies have been established to properly document not only publications, but also the related data and software. This relatively recent expansion of documentation requirements for data and software may presen

The purpose of this project was to document processes for USGS scientists to organize and share data using ScienceBase, and to provide an example interactive mapping application to display those data. Data and maps from Chase and others (2016a, b) were used for the example interactive maps. Principal Investigator : Katherine J Chase, Andy Bock, Thomas R Sando Accomplishments The accomplishment

Large amounts of data are being generated that require hours, days, or even weeks to analyze using traditional computing resources. Innovative solutions must be implemented to analyze the data in a reasonable timeframe. The program HTCondor (https://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/) takes advantage of the processing capacity of individual desktop computers and dedicated computing resources as a sing

Recent open data policies of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which were fully enforceable on October 1, 2016, require that federally funded information products (publications, etc.) be made freely available to the public, and that the underlying data on which the conclusions are based must be released. A key and relevant aspect of these

Legacy data (n) - Information stored in an old or obsolete format or computer system that is, therefore, difficult to access or process. (Business Dictionary, 2016) For over 135 years, the U.S. Geological Survey has collected diverse information about the natural world and how it interacts with society. Much of this legacy information is one-of-a-kind and in danger of being lost forever through d

Prior to this project, data acquired from the USGS Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have been provided to requesting scientists but have not been made available to the broader USGS community, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) bureaus, or the public at large. This project performed a pilot study and developed a strategy that is scalable to evolve into a permanent UAS data management capabili

ScienceCache is a scientific geocaching mobile application framework that targets two user groups for citizen science data collection: youth and geocachers. By melding training and games into the hunt for place-based data collection sites and incorporating photo uploads as data and authentication, new volunteers can collaborate in robust data collection. Scientists build a project on the administr

The purpose of this project was to support the enhanced search, access, and visualization capability for disaster maps and other contributed products on the public USGS Hazards Data Distribution System (HDDS) (U.S. Geological Survey, 2015). These products are often provided to USGS by collaborators for sharing across the response community during the course of an emergency event response; however,

Science is an increasingly collaborative endeavor. In an era of Web-enabled research, new tools reduce barriers to collaboration across traditional geographic and disciplinary divides and improve the quality and efficiency of science. Collaborative online code management has moved project collaboration from a manual process of email and thumb drives into a traceable, streamlined system where code

The United States has over 2 million dams on rivers and streams (Graf, 1999), and more than 84,000 of the larger dams are documented in the congressionally mandated National Inventory of Dams (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2015). The average age of these National Inventory of Dams is 52 years; by the year 2030, over 80 percent will be at least 50 years old (American Society of Civil Engineers, 201

Over the last few years, the ISO 19115 family of metadata standards has become the predominantly accepted worldwide standard for sharing information about the availability and usability of scientific datasets among researchers. The U.S. interests in the ISO standard have also been growing as global-scale science demands participation with the broader international community; however, adoption has

Large online data catalogs use controlled vocabularies to categorize datasets in ways that allow end users to sort and select data matching their needs. The eventual goal of this project is to build functional services so that the USGS Thesaurus and other USGS-controlled vocabularies will be available to the English-speaking scientific community, especially within the USGS where they can be used t