SEAD

Sustainable Environment – Actionable Data

2

Sustainability Science

Science

Technology

Economics

Poverty & Justice

Policy

Cooperation

Data challenges• Heterogeneity

of all kinds• Multiple scales• Multidisciplinary• Many small

datasets

Provide innovative new models and tools for serving the long tail of scientific research

SEAD Partners

Margaret Hedstrom, PIAnn Zimmerman

Beth PlaleKaty BörnerRobert McDonald

Praveen Kumar James Myers

George Alter & Bryan Beecher

SEAD’s Goals

• Provide data services that address the pressing needs of researchers working toward sustainability

• Integrate these services into an generalizable “Active and Social Curation” infrastructure well-suited to the social structure and economics of long-tail research communities

• Develop capabilities to package and migrate datasets to a federated repository infrastructure for long-term preservation

• Education, outreach, & training, to maximize value and disseminate SEAD’s contributions to other projects and communities

SEAD’s Strategy

• Move data curation upstream in the data life cycle

• Involve domain scientists in setting priorities for evolution of data and services

• Use a wide variety of mechanisms to remain resilient in a dynamic research and technology environment

Active and Social Curation• Engage researchers during projects, not at the end• Use information that is automatically captured or

generated through tools to reduce the costs of metadata collection and to capture its value in actionable form

• Further reduce costs by re-engineering curation processes to leverage this rich metadata and volunteered effort

Active Curation Model

Active Curation

Social Media

Data

Metadata

Workflows

ReviewRatingCommenting

SEAD Layercake View

• Services over an active content layer that is backed by/harvested into a federated archive infrastructure based on institutional resources Institutional Repositories

Network of Data Producers

Web User Interface

Active Content Repository

Services Provided

Virtual Archives

User Network

Data Conservancy

IU ICPSR

Content Mining

Curation Decisions

Archival data

generation

Other services

RPI UIUC UM

Acknowledgments

SEAD is funded by the National Science Foundation under cooperative agreement #OCI0940824