Urban Greenhouse Gas Resource Registry for Quantifying City Emissions: A Federated Framework for Geospatial Carbon Dioxide Data Products

Quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from cities informs researchers, stakeholders and policymakers about atmospheric carbon dioxide where it matters the most, urban regions with increasing population and traffic. The Greenhouse Gases Resource Registry (GHGRR) is a prototype that supports data discovery, access, and interoperability of high resolution urban CO2 datasets, inventories, and model products. Structured to foster multidisciplinary research collaborations and enable policy discussions, the GHGRR serves to facilitate discovery of related yet disparate open data sources. The GHGRR provides a community infrastructure connecting data providers, data users, and data interpreters to shepherd processes where combined knowledge leads to new understanding and validation of scholarship.

Modelled after the resource registry established at NIST for materials science research and metrology, the GHGRR framework fosters a federated model vetted by national and international groups such as the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CoData). Adopting their reference implementation, the registry supports a community-consensus based metadata schema that is sufficiently detailed with well-targeted discovery, but not overly complicated that may inhibit data-provider participation.

To enable open data to reach relevant data-users, the GHGRR is an important step to connect available archives and foster standard solutions which strive to deliver highly valuable carbon data resources with sufficient quality to resolve spatial and temporal data queries. This high-level registry will federate distributed organizational resources and data repositories for public access and use. To date, we have registered cities and urban regions in the US. We seek international participants and invite partner organizations to develop a similar federated network system to quantify urban carbon emissions. Experiences and lessons learned from expanding applications will be shared.