UBC library will use the funding from CANARIE to lead a project to build the Federated Geospatial Data Discovery for Canada, with collaborative support from UBC Advanced Research Computing and others.
UBC Library has been named as a successful recipient for the Research Data Management (RDM) funding call from CANARIE, a non-profit corporation that supports research, education and innovation in Canada. Announced in May 2018, the funding call requested projects that focused on the development of tools to support Canadian researchers in following data management best practices, according to priorities identified by CANARIE through consultation with RDM stakeholders. Nine recipients from institutions across Canada were awarded a total of 3.2M dollars in funding.
With this funding, UBC Library will lead a project to build the Federated Geospatial Data Discovery for Canada, with collaborative support from UBC IT, UBC VPRI ARC, Scholars Portal, University of Toronto, CARL Portage, Compute Canada, McMaster University, and the Canadian Historical Geographic Information Systems Partnership. Eugene Barsky, Research Data Services Librarian, Evan Thornberry, GIS Librarian, and Paul Lesack, GIS Analyst, are co-primary investigators on the project.
“Our collaborative goal for the next 18 months is to create an extensible open-source software that allows users to discover Canadian geospatial research data,” says Barsky. “We are very excited to work with our campus and Canada-wide partners, from Vancouver to Halifax to Hamilton, and cannot wait to get started.”
There is a growing interest in spatial research across disciplines, but the data repositories most commonly used in Canada right now often lack a map-based interface through which researchers can search through data for location-based components. The goal of the Federated Geospatial Data Discovery for Canada is to create an extensible software method to find and display location-aware data in a search interface that would be both map- and text-based.
“We’re making big steps forward with these opportunities to provide better support and discoverability for geodata produced by researchers here at UBC and others from across Canada,” says Thornberry.
For more information, please visit the UBC Library announcement and the CANARIE press release here.