Building a Virtual Laboratory While Supporting the Entire Life Cycle of Energy Geo-Science Data Management

Abstract:

With the data revolution and FAIR data practices has come the recognition that curation and open-access to federally funded research products is key to maximizing the benefit of use and reuse of those projects. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) began development and maintenance of the Energy Data eXchange^® (EDX) to address the needs of data curation while building the functionality needed to support a virtual laboratory. EDX has been leveraged significantly by DOE’s geospatial and geoscience programs for carbon storage, rare earth elements, and unconventional oil and natural gas related data curation and virtualization. It provides users with an online collection of data, capabilities, and resources that advance ongoing research. EDX supports NETL-affiliated research by coordinating historical and current data and information from a wide variety of sources to facilitate access to research that crosscuts multiple NETL projects/programs, providing external access to technical products and data published by NETL-affiliated research teams, and collaborating with a variety of organizations and institutions in a secure environment through EDX workspaces. EDX supports the entire life-cycle of data by securely sharing data from project inception to completion, facilitating and prudently governing secure access to team resources for multi-entity teams, and ultimately, ensuring preservation of that data and associated data products until the data is ready for publication. Fundamentally, the capabilities and functionality of EDX has grown and evolved over its decade of implementation, and is underpinned by a robust Governance protocol and procedure that addresses key challenges and needs for metadata flexibility, diverse data formats and types, managing data sharing, processing and archiving, and increasingly incorporating infrastructure for virtual analytics and commercial cloud options. The platform hosts and in some cases, virtualizes thousands of datasets encompassing millions of natural systems and engineering data features and attributes. The platform also has incorporated data visualization and virtual analytics through a web mapping application, Geocube, and containerized models and tools stemming from these research programs.