U.S. Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey A vision for a global community Linda Gundersen Director Science Quality and Integrity US Geological Survey Community for Data integration August 17, 2011

National and Global By Design – Addressing Major Societal Challenges USGS Strategic Science Directions: Understanding Ecosystems and Predicting Ecosystem Change Climate Variability and Change Energy and Minerals for America’s Future A National Hazards, Risk and Resilience Assessment Program Understanding of the role of the Environment and Wildlife in Human Health A Water Census of the United States

USGS Global and National Geologic Monitoring Systems and Databases  National Biological information Infrastructure  National Water Information System  Advanced National Seismic System  Global Seismographic Network  National Volcano Early Warning System  SC Debris Flow Warning System  Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost  MRDATA –mineral resources data  National Digital Geologic Map Database  The National Map  National Geophysical Database  National Oil and Gas Assessment  World Petroleum Assessment  Landsat 5 and 7  National Phenology Network  National Bird Banding Program  Famine Early Warning System  National Water Quality Assessment

Three years ago……. Skeptical but hopeful Our priorities were tools for USGS scientists and our modeling community, and greater accessibility of our data Started to reach out more aggressively to other communities Developed Critical Partners

Past year – Partnerships and Community  Co-host with NSF - Workshop on Working towards a National Geoinformatics Community at USGS Denver Federal Center, Denver, Colorado, September 23-24, 2010 (60 participants from 37 agencies and institutions)  Co-host with NSF - Geo-Data Informatics: Exploring the Life Cycle, Citation and Integration of Geo-Data Workshop March 2- 4, Broomfield CO.  Partner with NSF on Earth Cubed - transformative concepts and approaches to create integrated data management infrastructures across the Geosciences.

NGC Recommendations  Development of a catalog system to facilitate registration, discovery, evaluation and location of resources across the many organizations participating in the community is a high priority  A National Geoinformatics Organization should foster organic nucleation of workgroups to develop technology to solve specific interoperability problems in a particular domain context.  Communication network for members of community identify problems, develop solutions, and educate others on use of these solutions. This process can lead to bottom up development and community adoption of interoperability specifications with a good balance of simplicity, expressiveness, and flexibility”

Geo Data Informatics Recommendations  Communities need to come together and communicate to achieve interoperability within their communities, and interoperability across them.  Development of a community-of-practice that fosters communication, education and training, development and adoption of common tools and identification of core measurements. Communities-of-Practice can divide up the labor and work collaboratively to address shared challenges

Geo Data Informatics Recommendations  common community infrastructure for data life-cycle management  Sustainable archives of community data with services for search and integration are a high priority,  open and highly disseminated architecture that allows for institutions and individuals to join an infrastructure as a node for data and information while maintaining local control  Underlying standards and tools to support such an infrastructure were a central part of the dialogue at this workshop with education, metadata, and semantic solutions being dominant.  creating a shared vision of the priority problems to resolve and the goals to be reached within the next 10 years regarding data life-cycle management, the community could leverage its resources, find solutions and establish accessibility to data quicker and more efficiently and possibly move science and innovation forward at a faster pace.

PlioMIP  New Pliocene Model Intercomparison Project  14 different modeling groups from 11 nations  Predicting earth’s future climate based upon this warmest of intervals  Held at USGS July 2011 with co-hosts and participants form around the world  Creating a climate model of the Pliocene world including vegetation, ocean temperature, high resolution CO2 record, and behavior of major climate indicators to help us model current climate change

What is our Global Vision?  What are our goals for a national and global community? What are the priority areas?  What relationship do we want to have with other communities and why?  How do we expand to partner, leverage resources and knowledge, and reach goals we cannot reach alone?  How can we be the best partner?  How do we strengthen our current Community to be a strong partner?  What cultural and organizational changes will be needed?