Record Harvest from Data Providers

ScienceBase performs harvesting, data acquisition operations to obtain resources from various data providers. ScienceBase strives to catalog resources from authoritative data providers, who generate or own the data. Acquisition and amalgamation of USGS data is a fundamental intent for ScienceBase to improve access to USGS resources. ScienceBase harvests items from the following USGS databases:

1. BASIS+ Project Tracking System - harvested weekly (Monday). BASIS+ system provides information about USGS projects and because information has not been reviewed and approved, BASIS+ information is only available to logged in USGS users.
2. Publications Warehouse - harvested nightly. Links to publication landing pages and download artifacts are provided. Articles authored by USGS personnel and published by external journals are included.
3. National Geospatial Program (NGP) - harvest triggered by NGP to reflect updated information. Metadata describing published map products is available in ScienceBase for products available through The National Map download framework.
4. Other USGS systems are harvested periodically: Mineral Resources Data On-Line Spatial Data, USGS Energy Data.

External data systems are harvested upon request. ScienceBase communities may identify specific data providers of interest to their work and request harvest of other systems by e-mailing sciencebase@usgs.gov. For example, the GeoLibrary managed by the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center is harvested periodically to acquire data of interest to the Wyoming Landscape Conservation Initiative (www.wlci.gov), which uses ScienceBase to compile information about southwest Wyoming. Duplicate records derived and served by multiple data providers are sometimes harvested into ScienceBase. Work to filter and eliminate duplicate records has been identified to reduce redundancy (this is work in progress).

The Provenance information metadata field available in item summary pages records the item's origin and history in ScienceBase. Users adding records to ScienceBase, may provide provenance details indicating why the record was added to ScienceBase. In addition, ScienceBase populates the provenance field with the identity of the record contributor, which may be a user or a harvesting operation, and a time stamp recording item's creation or modification moment:

Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details