| Date post: | 08-Feb-2017 |
| Category: |
Science |
| Upload: | sky-bristol |
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Measuring the impact of an API-first mentality with ScienceBase after 4.5 years
Sky Bristol1Steve Tekell2
U.S. Department of the InteriorU.S. Geological Survey
1. USGS Core Science Analytics, Synthesis and Libraries
2. USGS Fort Collins Science Center
AGU Fall Meeting 2014
Talking Points
• ScienceBase – brief history• What does usage tell us about how the system
is doing?– Live apps– Usage logs
• Public search observations• Lessons and Implications
AGU Fall Meeting 2014
20062007
20092011- 2016
myUSGS Data Explorer/Data Uploader
Scientific Data Catalog/Comprehensive Science Catalog
ScienceBase 1.0 and then 2.0
API-driven design
121+ releases
Collaborative tools and simple file upload
Metadata Cataloging & Research Item Concept
Digital Repository & Research Item Faceting
API use exceeds portal traffic with 70+ API-driven apps
“In the research process, we need more than just a big catalog of data. We need all of the other important information connected to our work – published papers, manuscripts, software, and information about people, labs, projects, and others in our field.”
Inspiration and History
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API First
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Access to ScienceBase via code libraries is beginning to outpace access via the web portal and other clients
AGU Fall Meeting 2014
API access includes HTTP REST access to the ScienceBase Catalog along with OGC catalog requests and OGC data services (WMS, WFS, WCS, KML) for hosted data assets
AGU Fall Meeting 2014
Search engine optimization with schema.org metadata resulting in sometimes better results than our own search, easy custom search apps, and discovery “in the wild”
AGU Fall Meeting 2014
Full title search top of the search list most times
Adding “sciencebase” will get there every time
AGU Fall Meeting 2014
Simple searches without trigger words is still pretty good
Note here the more appropriate search result coming from the ScienceBase-driven web app
AGU Fall Meeting 2014
Lessons & Implications• When a data system becomes successful and used, it becomes
really difficult to pay down technical debt and invest in new capabilities.
• While it is possible to detect a tremendous number of signals from RESTful request logs, it takes significant engineering work to bake in useful reporting and analysis tools.
• Still work to do on semantics, linked data, and knowledge graph influence.
• API keys are hard to implement once the cat is out of the bag.• It’s hard to convince managers that “stealth apps” are the
greatest indicator of success.
AGU Fall Meeting 2014
Contacts
www.sciencebase.gov
www.google.com
Myriad other apps that may or may not indicate they are powered by ScienceBase
