Introduction As the reach and expansion of the web continues to go in a seemingly limitless direction, data managers are looking for ways to keep tabs on datasets and manage them in a way that can be accessible and useful to humans. This is especially true of environmental data, where the research and findings that utilize this data become more and more critical to humanities existence on this planet. As climate change evolves, natural disasters become more prevalent and powerful, and policy makers look for ways to adapt to our ever changing world, it becomes increasingly more important for researchers and data scientists to share their work. A paper written by researchers promoting the environmental data portal, EnviDat, developed by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL). Here, I'll break down this paper into a few key points and take aways that can be valuable to any environmental data scientists or stakeholders in environmental research. The importance of research data management communities EnviDat creates a unified and open sourced environment for data collected by WSL to be stored, downloaded and accessed by users around the world. Many organizations are shifting to a open-sourced and user friendly data management system and the field of environmental research and data management is no exception. In fact, the critical nature of finding ways to accomplish things like fresh water resource security, food security, natural disaster prevention and relief, make it more important than it's comparable fields. EnviDat provides this service for environmental researchers. According to it's promoters, "EnviDat supports data producers and data users in registration, documentation, storage, publication, search and retrieval of a wide range of heterogeneous data sets from the environmental domain." In addition, data storage, safeguards and availability are all factors that complicate the field of data science. With EnviDat, "the data layer bundles the PostgreSQL databases, the extensible virtual storage for the file repository, and the infrastructure mechanisms for ensuring the safety of the metadata and data such as backup and mirroring." A view of EnviDat's user friendly interface. Taken from: https://datascience.codata.org/articles/10.5334/dsj-2018-028/ Infrastructure, Framework and Guiding principals
The importance in joining of joining a community such as that provided at EnviDat are not confined to accessibility and storage. In fact, a more important point would be the way that community formalizes the process, so that sharing results, comparing analyses and communicating findings can be more efficient around the world. EnviDat creates a system in which users can create a "registration, a data repository, a controllable publication process, easy data discovery, provision of persistent identifiers and an overall user-friendly experience." With an infrastructure that is organized and user friendly, there must also be principles that users sign on to abiding by. These included, "unified data access, distributed research data management, selective registration and integration of data sets and curated data which can be summarized under the motto 'unified access, distributed curation'." But users can also be expected to follow the motto, "share as much as possible, conceal as much as necessary" According to researchers, EnviDat and WSL "will make its research data accessible within two years after the completion of a research project or a program phase for long-term research programs and monitoring projects." Finally, in order to make the user experience more uniform, "formal publication of research data with assignments of proper citation information using Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)" is expected for users. In addition, the use of repositories allows "data to remain close to the data producers and experts, which can help establish direct contacts between data users and producers and foster scientific collaborations." Why EnviDat? For any environmental organization, finding the right data to analyze can be a challenge. The community create by EnviDat is the step in the right direction for researchers who are doing such impactful work. This idealism can be summed up in the author's closing words. "Developing an institutional portal for environmental research data also forces us to reflect upon the future. Creating a zoo of unconnected web-based data portals worldwide will limit their usability and, in fact, might even reduce their usefulness and service to the science community and the public. Therefore, we consider it important to coordinate and connect between the various initiatives in order to avoid fragmented parallel developments."
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