National Geothermal Data System

National Geothermal Data System (NGDS)
National Geothermal Data System (NGDS)
	File:Ngds-logo-descending.png
Type	data
Location	United States
Protocols	WFS, WMS, ESRI Map Service, CSW
Established	May 28, 2014
Current status	operational
Commercial?	No
Funding	Original funding provided by United States Department of Energy

The National Geothermal Data System (NGDS) is a distributed data-sharing network designed to facilitate public access to digital data relevant to geothermal exploration and development. Data available through NGDS includes, but is not limited to borehole temperature measurements, geothermal gradients, active faults, and geochemical analyses. NGDS was initially funded by the United States Department of Energy Geothermal Technologies Program (awards DE-EE0001120 and DE-EE002850), as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

History

The National Geothermal Data System addresses the presence of hard copy documents stored in state geological survey archives. These documents include maps, field notes and well logs deemed potentially relevant to geothermal exploration and development. NGDS was created to achieve the following goals:

Digitization of state geological survey data; once digitized, data must be conformed to interoperable schemata (thereby facilitating standardized search terms and geospatial analyses)
Expose these data over the Internet with minimal cyberinfrastructure investment
Allow participating agencies to maintain ownership and control of data contributed to the system
Facilitate public discovery of, and access to, data contributed to the system
Support access to the system via free and open-source software

Participating Agencies

NGDS primary contributors include the United States Geological Survey, Southern Methodist University, and Association of American State Geologists geological surveys.

Architecture

NGDS employs standards, practices, and protocols provided by the USGIN Foundation; consequently, NGDS functions as a distributed network.

Nominally, any agency that contributes data to NGDS is responsible for maintaining the servers on which contributed data is stored. In practice: to compensate for the fact that some participating agencies do not have sufficient cyberinfrastructure capabilities to contribute data directly to the system, some participating agencies submit their data to contract-designated hubs. Data submitted to NGDS hubs is owned by the contributing agency. NGDS hub states include Arizona, Illinois, Kentucky, and Nevada.

NGDS Hub States alt text

A map demonstrating NGDS hub states; the states administered by hub states; and states that independently host their own data

Participating agencies are responsible for submitting metadata records to a central web-accessible catalog; these metadata records describe any data that has been contributed to NGDS. Consequently, data discovery takes place centrally via the NGDS metadata catalog while the upkeep of NGDS data is distributed proportionally to different data providers. Both NGDS data and the NGDS catalog can be accessed by common web browsers and web applications; NGDS data can also be accessed by GIS software applications, including ArcGIS, UDig, QGIS, and GvSIG.

Standards, Protocols and Software

NGDS uses standards, protocols, and software provided by the USGIN Foundation; consequently, data contributed to NGDS conforms to an appropriate GeoSciML-portrayal schema. NGDS data can be exposed using ArcGIS Server or GeoServer; protocols for data transfer include WFS, WMS, and ESRI Map Service. Metadata is transferred and discovered via CSW; NGDS metadata conforms to ISO standards 19115, 19119, and 19139.

Metadata catalog infrastructure is provided by a CKAN extension called GIN-Stack. Depending on the type of GIN-Stack instance installed, GIN-Stack provides a web-accessible interface that facilitates either metadata entry or metadata harvesting and discovery.

External Links

References