USGCRP’s Geocuration of Global Change Information

Abstract:

The U.S. Global Change Research Program’s (USGCRP’s) developed the Global Change Information System (GCIS) to provide specialists and the general public with accessible and usable global change information. GCIS focus is on the cross-cutting theme of Global Change Information that is spread across federal government repositories and the broader research community. An open source web-based resource, the GCIS provides human and programmable interfaces, relational and semantic representations of information, and discrete identifiers for various resources. GCIS’s capabilities demonstrated with the release of the NCA have been extended to support a set of USGCRP Global Change Indicators and will support future USGCRP scientific reports and assessments such as the Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health: A Scientific Assessment. GCIS provides named sources and contacts for figures, images and data sources, with the provenance continuing to the platforms and instruments or other observations on which the these documents are based. The GCIS team has been working with the U. S. Climate Data and Tools (CDAT) teams to demonstrate that by extending the GCIS ontology links can be provided between assessments, data and tools, as well as, help curate climate sub-themes such as those focused on a specific societal benefit area (e.g. health) or region (e.g. Arctic).