Data Governance
Our data management standards ensure our data resources are complete, accurate, accessible, valuable and of known quality.
Data is foundational to the success of the Chesapeake Bay Program, and effective data management is critical to the program’s mission. The program’s Data Center maintains data governance policies, procedures and standards to inform all aspects of the data lifecycle, from creation and processing to use, storage, and archiving. The Data Center works in collaboration with subject matter experts, who have in-depth knowledge of our data resources; data stewards, who work with these resources day-to-day; and data custodians, who maintain and preserve our data environment.
Goals and Guiding Principles
The Data Center strives to build trust in the Bay Program’s data products, create and enhance value in these products, and ensure these products are findable by both internal and external users. The Data Center has adopted guiding principles to inform the standards, policies and practices that form the backbone of our data governance program. These principles include discoverability and accessibility, as well as data classification, quality and consistency, reusability and interoperability, relevance, value and transparency.
Under these guiding principles, the Bay Program will, where possible:
- Ensure data resources are discoverable and accessible.
- Ensure data resources are complete, timely, accurate, authentic, valid and of known quality.
- Ensure data resources are aligned with the program’s mission, strategic plan, capabilities and data needs.
- Promote data classification, consistency, reusability and interoperability.
- Provide visibility into the processes and methods used to collect, store, manage and publish data resources.
Guiding Documents
Metadata
Our Metadata Specification presents minimal data resource documentation requirements for data resources across the Bay Program's data management and publishing environments. These requirements are designed to increase the consistency of data resource documentation across data providers, analysts and publishers so that Bay Program data resources contain the minimal documentation needed to support their use across all consumers and publishing environments.
Publishing
Our Data Publishing Guidelines present requirements for publishing data to the Bay Program's data-sharing environments. It focuses on Universal Publishing Requirements for all stewards and environments and on specific instructions for adding content to ChesapeakeData; addresses requirements for publishing to DataHub and ChesapeakeProgress; and explains relationships between the three environments and certain others used to distribute data resources, such as the Bay Program website, ScienceBase, and the Chesapeake Assessment Scenario Tool (CAST).
Archiving
Our Data Archiving Guidance is designed to help data stewards determine when and how to archive authoritative data resources. This includes determining which resources are candidates for different types of storage, and what different types of storage mean for accessibility and retrieval.
Deliverables
Our Data Resource Deliverable Guidance establishes uniform requirements to ensure the effective collection, processing and submission of data to the Chesapeake Bay Program Office. These requirements cover data formats, data documentation and metadata, as well as the appropriate use of coordinate systems, the precise reporting of numeric data elements and the consistent representation of dates and datetimes. These guidelines apply to all agencies, institutions and organizations participating in data and information collection, processing, document generation and submission to CBPO under grant or cooperative agreement funding unless alternative arrangements have been authorized.
Information Access
Our Strategy for Increasing Basin-wide Public Access to Chesapeake Bay Information was adopted in 1996. It was designed to increase access to electronic information about the Bay and enhance public understanding about related policies and programs. It led to the development of the Chesapeake Information Management System (CIMS), which has since become the Chesapeake Center for Collaborative Computing (C4): a cloud-based infrastructure that supports the collection, aggregation, storage, analysis and dissemination of data.