Managing data and business information presents an ongoing challenge for government organizations and private groups alike. The U.S. Geological Survey stores operational information (personnel info, organizational nomenclature, budget information, listings of active research efforts, manuscript and publication listings, catalogs for data products, etc.) across multiple disparate systems. The division of these informational holdings is a product of the internal organizational structure of the Bureau, as well as the fact that there is domain expertise among different groups and a division of responsibilities across day-to-day operations. Additionally, some information may be sensitive or have other access restrictions.
However, obtaining accurate and complete information often involves pulling content from multiple systems which can be difficult, or at times, impossible. A long term solution to these challenges is not another ‘Silver Bullet’ system that attempts to assimilate all of the disparate data holdings, but rather a paradigm shift in how we build these systems to better maintain, access, and integrate the data they store.
Different individuals and groups within the organizational structure often share a need for the same information, albeit to support different workflows for specific tasks. Care must be taken to avoid overfitting a particular process or tool for accessing content from separate data stores and instead, an emphasis must be placed on machine accessibility (APIs) and allowing different groups to pull the appropriate information freely into their own workflows. The solution: ‘Thinking in systems’ and putting in place a framework that supports flexible data integration.
The proposed topic is an invitation to a discussion to review some of the core informational systems in the USGS, define best practices for API design and service-oriented architecture, and share notes from those already working on forward-thinking approaches to storing, updating, and relationally linking high-level information in the Bureau to better support our mission needs.
Speaker 1: Colin Talbert (Data Management with Python at the FORT Collins Science Center) Speaker 2: Tara Bell (Workflows at the Great Lakes Science Center) Speaker 3: Dennis Walworth / Marla Hood (Workflows at the AK Science Center) Speaker 4: Drew Ignizio (ScienceBase, API Connections, and Integrated Information Management)
