Open Data Curation in the Cloud: Facilitating Transparency through Transformation of NCEI’s Data Stewardship and Curation Practices

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is transforming our infrastructure to utilize cloud technologies enabling open data, open science and collaboration. Open data and science reduces barriers for all, enables diversity of thought and facilitates collaborative scientific research leading to new discoveries and innovative techniques. NCEI will need to adapt current data stewardship services and information to support new disciplinarians and researchers in selecting and utilizing the best data for their purpose. Improving transparency of the data, processing and discoveries about the data from other users are key.

To support the technical side of open data and science, NCEI is on a journey to improve the capabilities and services supporting data discovery, access, use and re-use in a manner that facilitates collaboration and innovation. The new cloud archive system, known as the Open Information Stewardship Service (OISS), is part of the broader NESDIS Common Cloud Framework (NCCF). It leverages AWS cloud-technology, services within the NCCF, and knowledge graphs in a semantically-enabled, linked open data interoperability framework, OISS is enabling full provenance in a scalable, repeatable, and transparent platform.

This presentation will address key services and technologies currently being implemented in OISS which will enable data transparency, and it will describe a vision of how open data curation can facilitate data transparency in the future.