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SAEON ODP Data Submission Guidance
The SAEON Open Data Platform (ODP) is a catalogue of South African earth and environmental observation data. Information on submitting data can be found here.
Metadata
The DataCite schema is used to determine the minimum metadata for the SAEON ODP. The data submission form on the Submit data page will be used to capture metadata or a metadata template will be sent to data providers who don't use the form. There is guidance included in both the form and the template to assist data providers in filling it in. If any additional questions come up the data curators will assist.
Data formats and formatting
Please ensure that you have formatted your data according to the recommended formats and guidance below before submitting it.
| Data type | Recommended file formats | Additional guidance |
| Documents | Plain text (.txt), PDF (.pdf) | |
| Tabular data | Comma separated values (.csv) | Tabular data should be formatted in accordance with Hadley Wickham's tidy data principles doi.org/10.18637/jss.v059.i10. |
| Geospatial data | Shapefile (.shp, including .shx and .dbf), GeoTIFF (.tiff and .tfw) | |
| Multidimensional | NetCDF (.nc) | Refer to SAEON's NetCDF Guidance. |
| Time series data | Relational database (SQL), Comma separated values (.csv), Plain text (.txt) | |
| Images | TIFF (.tiff) | |
| Audio | Wav (.wav) | |
| Video | Quicktime (.mov), Mpeg 4 (.mp4) |
Data submissions workflow
Preservation planning
| # | Action | Description of action | Notes |
| 1 | Institutional data agreement | Prior to archiving or publishing data in any SAEON ODP infrastructure, SAEON collaborators need to sign a data sharing or service level agreement with SAEON. The purpose of the data agreement is to define the roles and responsibilities of SAEON and the data provider. The main sections of the data agreement outline:- Conditions of archiving data with SAEON- Responsibilities of the data provider in respect of metadata provision and intellectual property rights (including selection of an appropriate license)- Service levels and responsibilities of SAEON in respect of data management and dissemination.The process of getting a signed agreement is initiated by a member of the uLwazi node responsible for engaging with the data provider. The data curation team at uLwazi provides custodianship of all signed data agreements. | SAEON employees will only need to sign a data agreement if there are special requirements for the archiving or publishing of your data, or if you are working with external collaborators to deposit their data. As the data provider you would then be contacted by a member of the uLwazi node after you have contacted them indicating that you want to upload data (see the first row in the Data Submission Options Table below for steps on how to do that) . They will then send you, or the collaborators, a Data Agreement to sign. |
| 2 | Data management plan | Under certain conditions, data sharing agreements may not be required from the data provider. These include cases where internal SAEON staff and funded students make use of SAEON ODP data infrastructures. Under these conditions the data providers have to provide a Data Management Plan (DMP) or complete a survey describing the conditions of data archiving and sharing throughout the lifecycle of their research data outputs.The data curation team at uLwazi currently assists stakeholders with ad hoc data management planning and has created a DMP document for the SAEON nodes. | Data providers may be required to complete a DMP by funders, if so then this can in some cases be used instead of a data agreement. |
