Facilitating and Improving Environmental Research Data Repository Interoperability

Environmental research data repositories provide much needed services for data preservation and data dissemination to diverse communities with domain specific or programmatic data needs and standards. Due to independent development these repositories serve their communities well, but were developed with different technologies, data models and using different ontologies. Hence, the effectiveness and efficiency of these services can be vastly improved if repositories work together adhering to a shared community platform that focuses on the implementation of agreed upon standards and best practices for curation and dissemination of data. Such a community platform drives forward the convergence of technologies and practices that will advance cross-domain interoperability. It will also facilitate contributions from investigators through standardized and streamlined workflows and provide increased visibility for the role of data managers and the curation services provided by data repositories, beyond preservation infrastructure. Ten specific suggestions for such standardizations are outlined without any suggestions for priority or technical implementation. Although the recommendations are for repositories to implement, they have been chosen specifically with the data provider/data curator and synthesis scientist in mind

Facilitating and Improving Environmental Research Data Repository Interoperability

Environmental research data repositories provide much needed services for data preservation and data dissemination to diverse communities with domain specific or programmatic data needs and standards. Due to independent development these repositories serve their communities well, but were developed with different technologies, data models and using different ontologies. Hence, the effectiveness and efficiency of these services can be vastly improved if repositories work together adhering to a shared community platform that focuses on the implementation of agreed upon standards and best practices for curation and dissemination of data. Such a community platform drives forward the convergence of technologies and practices that will advance cross-domain interoperability. It will also facilitate contributions from investigators through standardized and streamlined workflows and provide increased visibility for the role of data managers and the curation services provided by data repositories, beyond preservation infrastructure. Ten specific suggestions for such standardizations are outlined without any suggestions for priority or technical implementation. Although the recommendations are for repositories to implement, they have been chosen specifically with the data provider/data curator and synthesis scientist in mind

Beyond Discovery: Cross-Platform Application of Ecological Metadata Language in Support of Quality Assurance and Control

Metadata may be generally understood to support discovery and performance of bibliographic functions against a given resource or set of resources. For example, a limited set of basic descriptive metadata can be used to index sets of items, group or otherwise associate similar items through shared metadata values, or to establish means of defining and enforcing relevance or other ranking systems. Within the context of curating research data, descriptive and other types of metadata (notably those defined the CCSDS Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System) may be more broadly applied to administer access and reuse policies, define system requirements, or perform quality assurance and control functions. However, whereas domain repositories such as the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Data Portal may capitalize on complex metadata schema such as the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) to perform an array of descriptive, technical, provenance, other repository functions, transferring data between these and more general, domain agnostic preservation systems such as university institutional repositories (IR) can result in a loss of features or services when descriptive metadata alone are crosswalked into the (typically Dublin Core) IR metadata schema. By way of exploring methods for maximizing the service and feature potential of complex metadata as harvested form a domain repository for archiving within an IR, a recent collaboration between the University of New Mexico Libraries and the Sevilleta LTER station demonstrates the application of EML at multiple stage in the data lifecycle as a means of performing quality assurance and control functions

Pasta: A Network-level Architecture Design for Automating the Creation of Synthetic Products in the LTER Network

The LTER Network is now within its “Decade of Synthesis”. Providing Network-level synthetic data products, however, is still a challenge for researchers in the Network and its 26 research sites. The Network Information System group at the LTER Network Office has designed and prototyped an automated Network-level synthesis architecture called “Pasta”. The Pasta architecture extends the data warehouse notion of extraction and loading of external data into a centralized data store by building on key technology already in use at the LTER Network – primarily the Ecological Metadata Language and the Metacat database. Once loaded, the source or site data are transformed from the local site schema and into a global schema, and a new metadata document cast as EML is generated and inserted back into the Metacat database. Finally, the data that conforms to the global schema, called “synthetic ” data, are exposed to the community through a number of different interfaces, including HTML and web services. This architecture is currently being developed through a “proof-of-concept ” approach for the “Trends ” project, and has recently been demonstrated at the LTER 2006 All Scientists Meeting in Estes Park, Colorado

Achieving FAIR Data Principles at the Environmental Data Initiative, the US-LTER Data Repository

The Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) is a continuation and expansion of the original United Stated Long-Term Ecological Research Program (US-LTER) data repository which went into production in 2013. Building on decades of data management experience in LTER, EDI is addressing the challenge of publishing a diverse corpus of research data (Servilla et al. 2016). EDI’s accomplishments span all aspects of the data curation and publication lifecycle, including repository cyberinfrastructure, outreach and training, and enhancements to data documentation methodologies used by the environmental and ecological research communities. EDI is managing almost 43,000 unique data packages and their revisions from a community of nearly 2,300 individual data authors, most of which are contributed by LTER sites, and are openly accessible and documented with rich science metadata in the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) standard. Here we will present how EDI achieves FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016, Stall et al. 2017), and report data use metrics as a measure of success. The FAIR principles serve as benchmarks for EDI’s operation and management: the data we curate are Findable because they reside in an open repository, with unique and persistent digital object identifiers (DOIs) and standard metadata indexed as a searchable resource; they are Accessible through industry standard protocols and are, in most cases, under an open-access license (access control is available if required); Interoperability is achieved by archiving data in commonly used file formats, and both metadata and data are machine readable and accessible; rich, high quality science metadata, with automated congruence and completeness checking, render data fit for Reuse in multiple contexts and environments, along with easily generated data provenance to document their lineage. The success of this approach is proven by the number and spatial and temporal extent of recent re-analyses and synthesis efforts of these data. Although formal data citations are not yet common practice, a Google Scholar search reveals over 400 journal articles crediting data re-use through an EDI DOI. However, despite improved data availability, researchers still report that the largest time investment in synthesis projects is discovering, cleaning and combining primary datasets until all data are completely understood and converted to a similar format. Starting with long-term biodiversity observation data EDI is addressing this issue by implementing a pre-harmonization of thematically similar data sets. Positioned between the data author’s specific data format and larger biodiversity data stores or synthesis projects, this approach allows uniform access without the loss of ancillary information. This pre-harmonization step may be accomplished by data managers because the dataset still contains all original information without any aggregation or science question specific decisions for data omission or cleaning. The data are still distributed into distinct datasets allowing for asynchronous updating of long-term observations. The addition of specific and standardized metadata makes them easily discoverable

Age, Race, Diabetes, Blood Pressure, and Mortality among Hemodialysis Patients

Observational studies involving hemodialysis patients suggest a U-shaped relationship between BP and mortality, but the majority of these studies followed large, heterogeneous cohorts. To examine whether age, race, and diabetes status affect the association between systolic BP (SBP; predialysis) and mortality, we studied a cohort of 16,283 incident hemodialysis patients. We constructed a series of multivariate proportional hazards models, adding age and BP to the analyses as cubic polynomial splines to model potential nonlinear relationships with mortality. Overall, low SBP associated with increased mortality, and the association was more pronounced among older patients and those with diabetes. Higher SBP associated with increased mortality among younger patients, regardless of race or diabetes status. We observed a survival advantage for black patients primarily among older patients. Diabetes associated with increased mortality mainly among older patients with low BP. In conclusion, the design of randomized clinical trials to identify optimal BP targets for patients with ESRD should take age and diabetes status into consideration

Age-related Blood Pressure Patterns and Blood Pressure Variability among Hemodialysis Patients

Background and objectives: Despite the high prevalence of cardiovascular disease among hemodialysis patients, the relationship between age and blood pressure (BP) is not well understood. It was postulated that the relationship of BP to age differs among hemodialysis patients versus the general population and that there is significant variability in dialysis unit BP measurements