Fit for Purpose: Assisting Users Data Discovery through the Application of the Data Stewardship Maturity Model

Assessing the stewardship maturity state of data is an essential part of ensuring and improving the way data are documented, preserved, stewarded, and disseminated to users. These assessments are a critical step towards meeting U.S. federal regulations for transparency of federally funded research data, organizational requirements, and user needs, and they can be used to assess data usability for a User’s purpose.

The Data Stewardship Maturity Matrix (DSMM) developed in partnership with NOAA’s National Centers of Environmental Information (NCEI) and the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites–North Carolina (CICS-NC) provides a uniform framework for consistent assessment within the context of data management and stewardship. DSMM includes nine key components, which include accessibility, usability, data quality aspects, transparency, traceability and data integrity. The DSMM assessment taken in totality can be used as a measure of the trustworthiness of the data management practices of the data repository.

NCEI used the DSMM to assess stewardship maturity of datasets archived within NCEI supporting NOAA’s OneStop Data Discovery and Access Framework Project. The DSMM assessment results were implemented in ISO 19115 within the dataset metadata record and used for breaking ties within OneStop search results. This implementation also provides consistent and interoperable information on data stewardship and management practices to the end users. This presentation will demonstrate the application of the DSMM to NOAA’s OneStop datasets, how the results have been captured and integrated within the OneStop framework, lessons learned, and a streamlined approach to ensure and enhance data usability, which can be used as a first step towards a community standard for data management and stewardship practices.