U.S. GEOSCIENCE INFORMATION NETWORK: THE USGS COMMUNITY ON DATA INTEGRATION

The U.S. Geological Survey is collaborating with the Association of American State Geologists in building US GIN (US Geoscience Information Network) a national federated distributed data network through its Community for Data Integration initiative under the Core Science Systems Mission Area.

The USGS Community for Data Integration (CDI) was established in 2009 to facilitate discovery of data and tools, improve use of scientific computing capacity, develop implementation of scientific data products and services, and enable data integration. The CDI provides a community of practice forum to focus on data integration issues, planning and to assist in implementing the data integration actions of the USGS Science Strategy. The USGS CDI is charged to:

1. Help develop the data integration strategy for the USGS.

2. Provide recommendations for implementation of data integration guidelines at the Bureau level and carry them out through community members.

3. Promote Bureau-wide data integration.

The CDI consists of data providers and consumers across all Mission Areas of the USGS, as well as external partners in government, academia, and industry. CDI has leveraged the application development resources of numerous science centers and programs to produce and promote several data integration tools to meet the needs of USGS scientists. These tools are designed to greatly ease the sometimes daunting job of data management and analysis typically performed by scientists.