Find research data visually, spatially and quickly

Research data can be hard to find, and even harder if you're researching a specific place. Geodisy changes that, giving you a window into the world of research data with map-based tools familiar to everyone. Search by place name, or by drawing a box. The world of research data is yours to discover. Geodisy is the software that will let you do just that.

People
Anyone looking for research data who wants to use a map or a box to find data. Researchers, students, journalists, and anyone else with an interest in data from university research will benefit from Geodisy's search tools.

Institutions
The first users of Geodisy will be FRDR, Canada's Federated Research Data Repository, for the quick and easy discovery of Canadian Research Data. When released, anyone with the available infrastructure will be able to plug in Geodisy and make a compatible repository more discoverable.

Data, and in particular research data, has always been difficult to find. Keywords can be hit and miss, and text based descriptions don't show you where your place of interest lies. Geodisy changes that, showing you where, not just what.

If you're a running a research data repository based on Dataverse, Geodisy will take your repository's data, search for geospatial metadata and files, and copy them to a new system which allows for visual searching. Your original data and search methods are untouched; you have the benefit of both.

Geodisy is a separate server software component that examines the metadata, such as the study records for research data and any associated data. If Geodisy finds spatial data, metadata and data are harvested, then normalized to have the same geospatial metadata standard. Afterwards, both data and metadata are injected into a geospatial data server and a viewer/search component.

Geodisy consists of middleware (a piece of software living on a server, not directly accessible to end users) that:

1. Harvests data and metadata from a repository (intially Dataverse)

2. Cleans and normalizes metadata and data found in study recods

3. Creates bounding boxes for data sets if applicable, and reads geometry from compatible files, such as shapefiles

4. Injects bounding box data and/ or geospatial data into a geospatial server, in this case Open Geoserver

5. Presents a visual search in the form of a Geoblacklight front end

Geodisy is open source All of the software you need will be free and open source (FOSS). The Geodisy middleware component will be available for download from Github. In addition to Geodisy, you will need:

1. A Dataverse repository to harvest from

2. Open Geoserver in which to place your data

3. Geoblacklight to allow users to search

Geodisy is available now. See it in action at geo.frdr.ca

Geodisy documentation is available in our Github repository

Because Geodisy is an open source project, all of our software is freely available. Download or fork the software from Github.

Look for us on Twitter! #geodisy

We are happy to chat. Contact the Geodisy team at [email protected]