Originating from a grant out of Utah State University, and now developed and administered by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI), Hydroshare provides a repository and additional data services for the hydrological research and education community.
The team recently published a study entitled Toward Open and Reproducible Environmental Modelling by Integrating Online Data Repositories, Computational Environments, and Model Application Programming Interfaces in the Environmental Modelling and Software journal.
“We approach the development and maintenance of HydroShare and connected apps with service to the water community in mind,” said CUAHSI Community Support Hydrologist Clara Cogswell. “In everything we do, we are hoping to lower the barrier to entry of sharing FAIR water data.”
To help achieve the team’s goal of being FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reproducible), Hydroshare was developed as a file-type agnostic repository, which means that any type of data can be uploaded to the system. Once uploaded, data can be kept private and shared between collaborators, made public so that general users can find and download the data, or it can be published and receive a DOI. Upon publication, the submissions are reviewed by CUAHSI staff for appropriate metadata and to ensure conformity to community guidelines.
HydroShare operates within a larger ecosystem of data services offered by CUAHSI, and is integrated with free compute services such as MATLAB Online and CUAHSI Jupyterhub. This connectivity allows users to open Jupyter Notebooks and MATLAB code directly from the HydroShare resource in which their data is stored, into a compute environment. Reproducible workflows stored in Jupyter notebooks and MATLAB files increases the FAIRness of data.
Funding for HydroShare was provided by the National Science Foundation (1928369). Other NSF awards include 1148453, 1148090, 1664018, 1664061, 1338606, and 1664119.