the project

background

Humber - Environmental Data Centre is a project funded in the first 2 years by Yorkshire Forward and run by Humber INCA in association with the North East Yorkshire Ecological Data Centre.

There are currently two project officers in post for the 18 month initial development phase; Clare Langrick (Industrial Liaison Officer) and Dan Jones (Environmental Data Officer).

Initially the data centre aims to prove its worth by delivering time and cost savings to local business developments. This will be achieved primarily through making legacy data (data which has been collected previously and subsequently archived) available and highlighting where data is absent or incomplete. Although the project funding does not include surveying for this missing data, the data centre can help to make a case for its collection in support of an organisation willing to take on the field work.

the data problem

Environmental data resources are held by a number of very different organisations for a number of equally different reasons. In the past data has been collected for a single purpose has been archived and essentially lost once that project has been completed. Data can be both difficult and expensive to collect so it is not economically viable to keep collecting essentially the same data for different reasons.

data centres

In response to this problem, the obvious solution would be to make sure all the data is held in the same place and in the same format. In the real world this is not a practical solution for a number of reasons:

• Some data resources are subject to intellectual patent law and therefore cannot always be freely exchanged.
• Data can represent a significant competitive advantage which would be compromised if made were available to competitor organisations.
• Organisations have license agreements with software vendors who support proprietary formats.
• Significant investment has already been made in making data available through searchable interfaces which needs to be leveraged rather than duplicated.

The objective of a data centre is to collate lists of the available data to aid its potential reuse in other projects. In addition to this, through the collation process the data centre should be able to uncover important sets of data which is either not being collected or is not available to the people who need to make use of it.

Additionally, data centres offer both organisations and individuals an alternative to storing and managing their own data sets. With the right contracts and licensing agreements the data centre can store, format, present and manage access to data on behalf of its originator. As these contracts can be negotiated individually, specific security, cost or access limitations can be applied to meet the originator's needs.

the vision

Data centres are key to meeting the needs of the various legislative frameworks which are being developed for environmental data collection and dissemination. The Humber environmental data centre should in time become part of a national framework of local data centres feeding into regional hubs which in turn feed into the national reporting mechanism. At present this model has not been tested in practice and so we will be working with NEYEDC to both prove that it is possible and that it really is a good idea.