This document discusses the Sustainable Environment - Actionable Data (SEAD) project. SEAD aims to provide data services to sustainability researchers by developing tools that address challenges like heterogeneous and small datasets. It plans to move data curation upstream, involve domain scientists, and leverage social media and metadata. SEAD will integrate these active curation services into a federated infrastructure to preserve datasets long-term. The project is led by researchers from multiple institutions and funded by the National Science Foundation.

1. SEAD
Sustainable Environment –
Actionable Data

2. Sustainability
Science
Science
Cooperation Technology
Policy Economics
Poverty &
Justice
2

3. Data challenges
• Heterogeneity
of all kinds
• Multiple scales
• Multidisciplinary
• Many small
datasets

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

5. SEAD Partners
Beth Plale
Margaret Hedstrom, PI Katy Börner
Ann Zimmerman Robert McDonald
Praveen Kumar James Myers
George Alter & Bryan Beecher

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. Active Curation Model
Active Curation Social Media
Workflows
Data Review
Rating
Commenting
Metadata

10. SEAD Layercake View
• Services over an Network of Data
Producers
active content
layer that is
backed Web User Interface
by/harvested Active Content Repository
into a federated Services Provided
archive Content
Mining
Curation
Decisions
Archival
data
Other
services
infrastructure generation
based on Virtual Archives
institutional Institutional Repositories
resources Data
Conservancy
IU RPI UIUC UM ICPSR
User Network

11. Acknowledgments
SEAD is funded by the National Science
Foundation under cooperative agreement
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