Cross-Cutting Improvements: The Development of a Geospatial Big-Data Infrastructure Supporting Socially and Environmentally Relevant Spatial Decision-Making and Analysis

This research coordination network will foster GIS (geographic information systems) and open data science support for faculty and student researchers in a regional cluster of HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), MSI (minority serving institutions), and local communities. The project will be led by a team of researchers across multiple departments in the newly formed College of Health and Science (CHAS) at North Carolina Central University together with three other minority serving institutions in the region.

This research coordination network will serve both the regional and larger scientific communities by advancing open science practices and principles in the development and deployment of data infrastructure and services needed to support the use of geospatial data in socially and environmentally relevant research activities.

Geospatial data analysis has been proven to advance the understanding of social determinants of health affecting COVID-19 incidence rates, as well as a wide variety of other socially and environmentally relevant research issues. This project will coordinate the creation of a large number of new GIS data layers and make them available to the larger multidisciplinary research community in accordance with FAIR data sharing principles together with rich, standards-based and machine-readable metadata.

Georeferenced data from disparate sources and disciplines will be enriched and normalized by standardized descriptive information based on a metadata schema, driven by the community of experts and intended end-users and compatible with international and federally mandated ISO 19115 standard and utilizing metadata profiles developed and used by state and local governments.

This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Directorate for Education and Human Resources and the HBCU Excellence in Research Program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.