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...and the Rhine-Meuse Delta Datasets Utrecht University holds a long tradition of studying the landscape, geomorphology and subsurface architecture of the Rhine-Meuse Delta (Dutch: Rijn-Maas Delta, RMD). These days we are moving these datasets into Open Science domains. A challenge to do so is to find a way where we can release and serve datasets as Open Data, but at the same time can harvest feedback, correct errors, update insights, append new data and push updates.
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This is the reason that we are setting up what we call a 'wikiwfs' system. Herein, WIKI stands for 'community-editable' (as in wikipedia) and WFS stands for 'web feature service' (streaming of vector map data with attributes). We began setting it up in 2019, and the web frontend is moving from alpha to beta deployment in May 2021. The idea and intention is that the wikiwfs system is the main place where the faculty shares medium-sized Open Datasets in their most actual form. At the same time, it is to be a place where editors of the datasets take in feedback from users and push through suggested corrections. These users include staff and students, external collaborators, professionals making regular applied use of the data, or enthusiastic citizen scientists.
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We will also continue to deposit our datasets in more traditional ways, i.e. as date-stamped static repositories (e.g. RMD basemap 2012, LLG boreholes 2017). We use the RMD datasets to develop the wikiwfs as these are a data lake of diverse contents in terms of formats (Relational Tables, Point, Line, Polygon, Raster and Voxel gridded data) each of them medium-sized (not millions, but many thousands of features). Distributing and mining and validating and improving such data requires multiple ways of interlinkage (on IDs, on coordinates, via URL, API, GIS service), which the wikiwfs system is intended to provide. Our servers could host further datasets of other groups within the Faculty of Geosciences. |
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