The Global Change Information System and Climate Assessment Provenance

The Global Change Information System (GCIS) is a web-based, open source digital platform that supports and maintains provenance for reports and assessments produced by U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). USGCRP’s major reports include the National Climate Assessment (NCA), the annual report to Congress Our Changing Planet, and the Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR2). For the past five years, GCIS has been a valuable resource and tool to access the data as well as metadata for these reports. It provides accessibility, traceability, and reproducibility for USGCRP science, and is committed to sustaining that support for posterity. The GCIS data model uses both relational databases to link resources as well as semantic ontologies to describe relationships in a well-organized way to achieve data integration. 

The GCIS team has been working on enhancements and improvements focused on user needs. One of the recent model improvements is establishing a scoring scheme for assessing our metadata and the connections among records. The main objective of this evaluator to assess the communication of the provenance provided by our publications. The secondary objective is to inform decisions about where to direct data management work by identifying weak or broken provenance of the resources in our system. With that in mind, the objective of this poster to display our scores and the methods to improve our scores. We can demonstrate a significant increase in metadata quality between the third and fourth National Climate Assessments due to our use of the scoring system as well as improvements in data collection and integration.