Host Your Own Data

Data self-hosting is central to USGIN. Self-hosting provides autonomy, promotes agility, and increases familiarity with data, all of which increase the value of the data and improve the user experience. Self-hosting does not mean your data is isolated—far from it. By becoming a USGIN node, your data is more likely to be discovered by a broad spectrum of users.

Our friendly, specialized tech team can guide you through every step in the process.

Serve, Control, and Share your Data

Self-hosting puts you in control of your data's availability. Your data resources are hosted on your servers and made visible to others through a metadata listing in the NGDS catalog. Users can access your data from the catalog using USGIN's information schemas and interchange formats. You can always determine the level of access others have to your data. Data resources that are restricted can still be part of the system; simply define the protected status in the metadata.

Cost Effective

Likewise, you can manage upkeep costs according to your needs and budget by selecting the most cost-effective mix of locally-managed, third-party, and cloud-based hardware systems. Initial costs and upkeep costs vary depending on the scale of a given data contribution.

Autonomy—Maintain Control Over Data and Deployment

Decide what you want to serve and the path to getting it online
Options to keep password protection or other access control
Fewer hands on the data results in BETTER DATA QUALITY

Scalable and Agile Solution

Pipeline is shorter to update or add content quickly and easily
New information exchanges are easy to develop and can be customized to your specific data sets
Service capacity is scalable and on-demand

Quality Data and Customer Service

Scientists working directly with data better communicate attributes for downstream value
Trained in-house tech team are more familiar with scientific data than most outside contractors
Direct customer feedback improves services and data for better customer experience and data use

Discover the Distributed Data Repository

Large online repositories require extensive centralized infrastructure that must be built, configured, maintained, and expanded. An online repository large enough to accommodate nationwide earth science data would require costly and complex infrastructure that would be difficult for a single agency to build and maintain. Furthermore, access and submission of data to online repositories is often controlled, limiting the extent to which contributors can update and control their data.

As a distributed, federated network concept, USGIN offers a sleek alternative to online repositories by establishing data-sharing standards and protocols to construct decentralized web-based data-sharing networks. USGIN data can be self-hosted and directly controlled, updated, and validated by the agency providing the data, so information stays up to date and errors are minimized. Anyone can contribute data to USGIN by hosting their data on an appropriately configured server and making metadata available for harves to the catalog; likewise, the general public can use the USGIN catalog to search for and access the data through a simple web browser. Rich content in metadata records using the ISO 19115 standard enable much more effective evaluation of search results than is possible with the simple text and link indexing done by commercial search engines.

USGIN can accommodate nearly unlimited growth. It is decentralized, so the cost of data storage is automatically distributed amongst USGIN contributors. The use of free-and-open-source software minimizes infrastructure costs of participation. Development and use of Tier 3 data exchanges maximizes interoperability, making data accessible in numerous ways. This allows earth science data to be shared, compared, merged, and analyzed side-by-side with a few clicks of a mouse.