The UBC Library Research Commons has released a major update to the open-source data discovery tool Geodisy, expanding the content collection available for search to include more than 86,000 records from over 70 Canadian research data repositories, through an integration with the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) Discovery Portal. In partnership with Portage and with funding from the New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization (NDRIO), the new release is an important step forward in creating a uniquely powerful visual data-discovery tool for researchers across Canada.
Geospatial search now available in key Canadian research data repositories
Developed collaboratively by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries’ (CARL) Portage Network and the Compute Canada Federation (CCF), the FRDR service was created to address a “longstanding gap in Canada’s research infrastructure by providing a single platform from which research data can be ingested, curated, preserved, discovered, cited and shared.”
Pulling data directly from FRDR’s metadata index, Geodisy users can now visually discover content from notable repositories such as Open Data Canada, the Polar Data Catalogue, BC Data Catalogue, Canadian Integrated Ocean Observing System (CIOOS), and DataStream.
Forging a new direction for Geodisy
Geodisy launched last year in April 2020 as an open-source spatial discovery platform, with data sourced from Scholars Portal Dataverses. Phase 1 of the Geodisy project was the result of a collaboration between the UBC Library Research Commons, UBC Advanced Research Computing, GeoBlacklight, Dataverse, Scholars Portal and Portage, supported with grant funding by CANARIE.
“With Phase 1 of Geodisy, the goal was to create an open source discovery tool for Canadian research data using a map-based search,” says Mark Goodwin, Geospatial Metadata Coordinator, who works alongside Program Analyst Paul Dante as the dedicated Geodisy duo at the Research Commons, also embedded within Portage’s FRDR team. This build became a proof-of-concept, which remains available as an open source middleware tool with a Dataverse pipeline that can be implemented using the code and instructions found on the UBC Library GitHub. Goodwin says there continues to be “quite a bit of interest from both national and international Dataverse community members to adapt this tool at their own institutions.”
Creating positive change within the national research data management community
Alex Garnett, Research Data Management & Systems Librarian at SFU, says he’s very happy to see the recent work completed: “This will help us demonstrate value to researchers across the country far more readily and usefully than our patchwork of local solutions. My congratulations and thanks to all of my colleagues at UBC and on the FRDR team for making this happen.”
Michael Steeleworthy, Coordinator of Research Data Services at Wilfrid Laurier University, notes the positive impact Geodisy has had at his institution. “I have a number of researchers [who] didn’t see the value of depositing their data into a repository that FRDR/Geodisy indexes until I showed them the discovery functionality that Geodisy provides.” This latest milestone has been a gamechanger, he says, for some researchers who now “see how the data can be discovered, sorted, and accessed through the functionality.”
The Geodisy and FRDR teams are already at work on the next update, which will make the tool available in French to accommodate the large segment of French-speakers active in the Canadian research data management community, and to provide a French translation of Geodisy’s frontend interface, Geoblacklight, to the open source community as part of a multi-institutional open source initiative.
Learn more about the Geodisy project and access the tool directly through FRDR.
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The UBC Library Research Commons is a multidisciplinary hub that supports research endeavours and provides training in research-enabling skills. We embrace both new and traditional exploratory scholarship and provide services, software, and expertise. Our services include expertise in digital scholarship, including geospatial and data services; a digital Scholarship Lab with powerful computers, for research, experimentation, collaboration, and work with big data, consultations and workshops for UBC researchers and once UBC returns to campus, a welcoming space for projects and presentations.
This project is part of UBC Library’s strategic direction to advance research, learning and scholarship.
Learn more about our Strategic Framework.
