MANAGING THE EXPLOSION OF HIGH RESOLUTION TOPOGRAPHY IN THE GEOSCIENCES

Technologies such as structure from motion (SfM) photogrammetry, and terrestrial and UAS-based laser scanning (lidar) have dramatically decreased the cost of collecting high-resolution topography. As a result, the number of researchers collecting topographic data is increasing. These “long-tail” topographic data are typically of modest size but also potentially of great scientific value; yet challenges exist to making them widely findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Presently, there is no central community repository to support storage and curation of these datasets.

The U.S. National Science Foundation funded OpenTopography (OT) Facility employs cyberinfrastructure including large-scale data management, high-performance computing, and service-oriented architectures, to provide efficient online access to large HRT (mostly lidar) datasets, metadata, and processing tools. With over 289 datasets and 28,715 registered users, OT is well positioned to be the archive for community collected high-resolution topographic data.

To address the need for a central repository for “long-tail” topographic data, OT has developed the “Community DataSpace”, a service built on a low cost storage cloud (e.g. academic or AWS S3) to make it easy for researchers to upload, curate, annotate and distribute their datasets. The system’s ingestion workflow extracts metadata from data uploaded; validates it; assigns a digital object identifier (DOI); and creates a searchable catalog entry, before publishing via the OT portal.

The OT Community DataSpace enables wider discovery and reuse of these high-resolution topographic datasets via the OT Portal and sources that federate the OT data catalog. The system also promotes data citation, and most importantly increases the impact of investments in data to catalyzes scientific discovery. As of the time of this abstract submission, less than six months since the launch of the OT DataSpace, over 30 datasets have been uploaded.