99th ESA Annual Meeting (August 10 -- 15, 2014)

WK 5

Lightweight Social Data Curation and Preservation for Sustainability Research: An Introduction to SEAD Services and Tools

Sustainability research requires reliable cyberinfrastructure and an enhanced ability to manage, integrate, share, and preserve data across a broad range of disciplines. Unfortunately, many existing data services need significant ongoing local IT support, lack the flexibility required for data reuse across projects, and simply do not fit the needs of individual researchers and small teams. By focusing on the requirements of smaller projects and enabling the management of data throughout their entire lifecycle, SEAD (Sustainable Environment -- Actionable Data) (http://sead-data.net) has developed data services that are both powerful and easy to use. This workshop will introduce and orient attendees to SEAD’s suite of data curation tools. Using these tools, scientists can preview their data within a web interface; automatically extract metadata from their data files; easily search across datasets; view map overlays of data; and annotate data with tags that are then shared across a project team (along with many other functions). We will also be soliciting feedback to aid in future developments. Participants should bring laptops as well as some of their data so that they can get hands-on experience using SEAD tools. This workshop is FREE, but you must register for it. Light refreshments are included.