The principal objective of GDSC is to facilitate replicability in research and to facilitate the sharing of high value geographic data for reference or educational purposes.
Currently geographical data curation at the University of Miami is performed ad-hoc. Research teams and administrative offices create poorly designed solutions that are not aligned with each other (and sometimes duplicate each other), are not interoperable, are hard to discover by other research teams or administrators, and have no plans for sun setting or long-term archiving. These current practices make scientific replicability difficult if not impossible and create duplicate workflows. If we continue with the status quo, geographic data at UM will remain hard to find, difficult to share across projects, and require ongoing duplicate effort to curate data for each individual project.
As a solution to this problem GDSC will provide a platform to dynamically discover, publish, and/or consume raster and vector geographic data. GDSC is a highly curated set of collections of geospatial data with coverage in south Florida and the Global South of the western hemisphere. It is comprised of a datastore and a metadata repository dynamically linked to a platform to publish and/or consume geospatial data with well-known open protocols for sharing GIS data such as the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) as well as the Environmental Earth Systems Institute’s (ESRI) parallel proprietary protocols for ArcGIS Map Server and ArcGIS Feature Server. The platform includes access controls to enable publication and sharing of open data as well as data that requires restricted use. The metadata repository uses the Dublin core, DataCite, and the international ISO 191xx series of metadata standards to enable discovery and sharing.
The University of Miami Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC), the University of Miami Libraries (UML), and University of Miami Information Technology (UMIT) will collaborate to provide the human and infrastructure resources to make GDSC possible.