Summary and Setup
Research data is most valuable when others can find it, understand it, trust it and reuse it, long after the project that created it has ended. This module covers the principles of curating and sharing geospatial data: describing data with metadata and documentation, preserving it for the long term, publishing it in repositories with persistent identifiers and licenses, and protecting the people and places that location data can reveal.
The module is conceptual: it has no programming or software exercises. Each episode includes examples and challenges with solutions.
| Episode | What you will learn |
|---|---|
| Introduction to Data Curation | What curation is, the curation lifecycle, public access policies and the FAIR principles |
| Metadata | Kinds of metadata, essential geospatial elements, and standards such as ISO 19115, DataCite and DDI |
| Documentation | README files, codebooks, provenance, and citing data |
| Preservation | Durable formats, checksums, the OAIS model, trustworthy repositories and very large data |
| Sharing and Publishing Data | Choosing a repository, DOIs, licenses, access levels, and the FAIR and CARE principles |
| Ethics and Sensitive Location Data | Re-identification, aggregation and geomasking, sensitive places, consent and review |
Prerequisites
- No prior GIS or programming experience is needed
- The Data Management module is helpful background, especially its episodes on file formats and organizing data
This module is part of Enabling the Geospatial Turn in the Social Sciences, a set of training modules developed at Purdue University with support from the National Science Foundation.
This module is theory only: there is nothing to install and no data to download. You need only a web browser to read the episodes and to explore the repositories and standards they link to.
Optional, for exploring:
- QGIS (https://qgis.org), to look at its metadata editor (Layer Properties > Metadata)
- An ORCID iD (https://orcid.org), free, if you plan to publish data or articles
- Access to your institution’s research repository; at Purdue, PURR (https://purr.purdue.edu/)
To practice the challenges, it helps to have a dataset of your own (or one from another module) to document and plan for sharing.