SEAD: Sustainable Environment-Actionable Data Leveraging Existing Cyberinfrastructure for Long-Term Sustainability Margaret Hedstrom-University of Michigan James Myers-Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Robert H. McDonald-Indiana University Presentation at Research Data Access & Preservation Summit 22 March 2012

1. SEAD: SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT-
ACTIONABLE DATA
Leveraging Existing Cyberinfrastructure
for Long-Term Sustainability
Margaret Hedstrom-University of Michigan
James Myers-Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Robert H. McDonald-Indiana University
Research Data Access and Preservation Summit 3.22.12
New Orleans, LA
#OCI0940824

2. SEAD TEAM
University of Michigan: Margaret Hedstrom (UM PI), Ann Zimmerman
(Co-PI and Project Manager), George Alter, Bryan Beecher, Charles
Severance, Karen Woollams, Jude Yew.
Indiana University: Beth Plale (IU PI), Katy Borner, Robert H.
McDonald, Kavitha Chandrasekar, Robert Ping, Stacy Kowalczyk,
Robert Light.
University of Illinois:Praveen Kumar (UIUC PI), Rob Kooper, Luigi
Marini, Terry McLaren.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Jim Myers (RPI PI), Ram Prasanna
Govind Krishnan, Lindsay Todd, Adam Wilson.

3. SEAD CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
• An international resource
for sustainability science
• Novel technical and
business approaches to
supporting the long-tail of
research data
• Lifecycle support:
actionable data services
integrated with curation
and preservation
infrastructure

4. SUSTAINABILITY RESEARCH IS CENTRAL
TO SOLVING MANY OF SOCIETY’S
MOST CRITICAL CHALLENGES
• Local processes aggregating to produce global
consequences
• Multiple time scales
• Coupling of natural and human systems
• Interacting systems-of-systems requiring
multidisciplinary understanding
• Environmental – Economic - Social
Science
Cooperation Technology
Policy Economics
Poverty &
Justice

5. DATA CHALLENGES IN
SUSTAINABILITY RESEARCH
• Many dimensions, many coordinate systems,
many scales, many formats, a long-tail of
providers and users, …

6. ENABLING SUSTAINABILITY RESEARCH
• Discovering and integrating data are a major barrier!
• Organize data geospatially, temporally, and thematically
• Understanding the quality and applicability of data is a
significant challenge!
• Provide provenance, literature connections, QA/QC
information, and other evidence about the data
• Collaborating across projects to coordinate data
collection and analysis to address inter-disciplinary
issues is a further barrier!
• Provide ways for groups to collaborate and share data directly
during active projects

7. BUT...
• Managed Data storage and services are expensive!
• Begging for metadata doesn’t work!
• Curation and preservation are time consuming!
• The long-tail is not standardized!
• Data collections are always missing something
valuable!
• Data models evolve!
• Cyberinfrastructure is obsolete by the time you build it!
• Building community as you leverage
cyberinfrastructure

8. SEAD: LEVERAGING EXISTING
RESOURCES
• Cyberinfrastructure
• IU Data Capacitor/HPC Capabilities
• UIUC/NCSA HPC Capabilities
• Rensselaer CCNI Capabilities
• Repositories
• UM Deep Blue
• IU ScholarWorks
• ICPSR Repository
• UIUC IDEALS

9. KEY QUESTIONS
• What could SEAD capture when?
• A lot, as its created!
• Take advantage of semantic approaches
• How can SEAD provide direct value to data producers,
users, and curators?
• Single mechanism for managing project and reference
data!
• Value-added network-effect altmetrics services!
• How can SEAD lower barriers and reduce/realign costs?
• web 2.0, 3.0, and social computing!

10. SEAD 18 MONTH PROTOTYPE TARGETS
FOR CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
• Active and Social Content Curation
• Pilot Active Content Repository, VIVO deployments
• Exemplar services for Data Ingest, Discovery, Re-use,
Curation
• CI for Long-term Access
• Data model, protocol design/development
• Pilot Federated Repository infrastructure

11. SEAD CI QUICKVIEW
• SEAD will quickly build a repository and data services infrastructure for
sustainability research that can be responsively adapted based on
community feedback – Community Agile Development
• SEAD will leverage existing tools and emerging practices to
dramatically enhance the interactions of researchers and data
librarians – Active Curation
• SEAD’s focus on the long-tail will force an emphasis on ease-of-use
and low costs that is critical for long-term sustainability – Leverage
Existing Institution Resources for Long-term Access
• SEAD will leverage experiences in the sustainability research
community to provide guidance for other long-tail communities making
the transition to an interdisciplinary, systems-oriented approach to
research – Sustainability and Resource Growth Partnership and
Collaboration

12. THANK YOU
For more on SEAD go to:
http://sead-data.net
Follow on Twitter
@SEADdatanet
#OCI0940824