City of Seattle Public Utilities

The Challenge: The City of Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) managed diverse environmental data with an overarching need for long-term storage and access through evolving business and technological changes, particularly for its 50-year regulatory habitat conservation plan. They faced business problems where data stewards couldn't efficiently search, retrieve, or evaluate datasets, and institutional knowledge was being lost due to data not transcending people and time. Their existing data was not preserved in a long-term, cohesive repository, and there was a specific challenge in uniformly structuring distinct habitat disciplines into a unified information model. SPU needed to replace their legacy SIMS 1.0 system.

 

The EDI Solution: SPU chose to utilize the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) to manage their Watershed Natural Resource data and address these critical business and technology objectives. EDI's comprehensive solution involved:

 

• Onboarding and Training: Providing remote training to SPU scientists on best practices for data publication, data cleaning, and metadata organization within the EDI repository.

• Data Migration & Publication: Supporting SPU in discovering, analyzing, and transforming existing data, and then publishing it to the EDI repository. This included implementing agreed-upon metadata and data structure standards and integrating data packages into EDI's staging portal.

• Infrastructure & Customization: Setting up cloud storage within the EDI repository, providing consultation on data repository architecture design, and developing custom functionalities such as Microsoft SSO for user management and enhanced search capabilities for SPU's specific use cases.

• Ongoing Support: Providing continuous data curation support, data package handling, management, and storage within the EDI repository, ensuring new data collection is integrated and long-term packages are updated.

The Impact & Outcomes: By partnering with EDI, SPU aims to securely store watershed monitoring information for over 50 years, ensuring long-term data preservation. This collaboration enables SPU to meet crucial long-term regulatory reporting requirements, significantly improve user experience for data stewards, and gain the ability to effectively modify and manage their data and associated documents. Furthermore, EDI facilitates sharing SPU's environmental data with external parties, contributing to broader transparency and collaboration in natural resource management.