Enhancing Value of Environmental Data: Data Lineage Reporting

Abstract

Concerns about environmental data quality and the need for data documentation are increasing due to increased accessibility to and demand for environmental data. Local, state, and federal agencies as well as consultants, researchers, and the public are interested in current, reliable, accessible, and understandable data. It is often necessary to rely on data obtained from secondary sources, originally collected for purposes other than present applications. Information describing form, specificity, and processing are needed, in addition to assessment of data quality, to make informed decisions about the usefulness of secondhand data. This paper merges the thinking of environmental sciences and spatial information systems, and presents an initial proposal for an environmental data lineage report. The proposal describes two kinds of information needed in a lineage report—an overview of the data collection process, and an overview of relevant legal and organizational factors driving the data collection. The process description includes information about sample design, site conditions, instrument calibration, data recording and processing, and so forth. Description of legal and organizational factors such as laws, decision criteria, and existing standards explain the original purpose for data collection.