HydroShare Resources

A “Resource” is defined as the fundamental unit of digital content in HydroShare that contains data and/or model files and their corresponding metadata. 

Think of a resource as a container into which you put the content you want to share. Much of the functionality of HydroShare is focused on resources. You can create resources, manage access, version, share with your colleagues or with a collaborative group, and permanently publish resources. HydroShare resources are flexible to support data formats widely used in water sciences. Any file type can be added to a HydroShare resource and, if desired, be described with file level metadata. Multiple files of different types may be grouped together in one resource, such as: 

  • Shapefiles representing a watershed boundary (polygon), observation sites (points), and time series and reference time series representing observations at those sites. 
  • Shapefiles, log files, and grid files from a watershed analysis.
  • Model instance files with files that are specifically typed as associated with a model.

Data within a resource:

  • Is managed as one searchable unit - discovery is at the resource level, not at the file level.
  • Contains a single access control designation (i.e., all content within the resource is either public or private; owners and editors have the same access to all content files).
  • Has one unique identifier/url/DOI (DOIs are only issued for published resources).
  • Has one set of resource level metadata (authors, contributors, spatial and temporal coverage, etc.).
  • Can have metadata specific to each file or content aggregation within the resource. See here for more information.

Resources are structured using a formal data model that is based on the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange standard, or OAI-ORE (Lagoze et al., 2008). More detailed description is provided by Horsburgh et al. (2016). Within resources, content types are supported as file aggregations (e.g., geographic features or rasters). “Aggregation” refers to related groups of computer files and is adopted from OAI-ORE (Lagoze et al., 2008). See here for more information on different content types in HydroShare. Resources may also be grouped together into a collection (see here for more information).

References

Horsburgh, J. S., M. M. Morsy, A. M. Castronova, J. L. Goodall, T. Gan, H. Yi, M. J. Stealey and D. G. Tarboton, (2016), "HydroShare: Sharing Diverse Environmental Data Types and Models as Social Objects with Application to the Hydrology Domain," JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 52(4): 873-889, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1752-1688.12363.

Lagoze, C., H. Van de Sompel, P. Johnston, M. Nelson, R. Sanderson and S. Warner, (2008), Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange: ORE Specification – Abstract Data Model, http://www.openarchives.org/ore/1.0/datamodel.html.