The lab procedure, generally:

In Part 1 of this “lab” you’ll write a short review of your experience with your file sharing service — what did you like about it, what did you not like. Be specific, but don’t go over 1 page.

Then, imagine that the tool you chose was a front-end to some data repository. That is, if you chose DropBox, pretend DropBox was just a GUI to GEON or OneGeology or some other community portal. Write about the key benefits and detriments to this scenario. A good way to do this is to imagine in detail your workflow if you were using DropBox as a means to submit your research data to your agency’s spatial data repository. Think about the arc of geoscience we followed this semester — researchers need to find data using the metadata written about it; researchers need to connect to and/or download those data; researchers need to understand what they’ve connected to/downloaded; researchers need efficient (but robust) mechanisms for putting their own data back up for the next scientist down the line so the cycle can repeat. What should you do as a researcher dropping data into DropBox? What should DropBox then do with it? What would become of it?

Length:

Imagine yourself in a regular Friday lab — it should fill that time but probably not go over (depends on how efficiently you do your deep thinking).

The major objective(s):

Each of you was asked to choose a file exchange service through which you submitted assignments to me this semester. Part of the impetus behind this was to encourage you to seek out (and thereby expose us all to) novel and useful sites and services. The other part was to make you become familiar with the service so that in the end (now) you could look back on your use of the utility and ruminate on which (if any) of the service’s ideas and features would translate well to the public sharing and exchange of geospatial data. This lab is designed to have you take what you now know about geoinformatics and geospatial data and wrap it around your file sharing technology. We’ve looked at many tools this semester for handling data and building workflows — what if this was one of them?

The lab report:

1 document, as described. Any format except MSWord.

Grading:

lab is worth 10 points