Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Review of the State Geothermal Data project

It's snowing here in Denver, where the US Dept. of Energy's annual peer review of funded geothermal projects is underway.

AZGS manages the $22 million "State Geological Survey Contributions to the National Geothermal Data System" project which is digitizing and serving online vast amounts of geoscience data to enhance exploration, evaluation, and development of geothermal energy.

We gave our formal presentation to the peer review panel on Monday afternoon followed by a spirited question and answer session.   We should get the reviewers evaluations in the next  couple of weeks.   The project received very high marks in previous annual reviews.

We are serving data from all 50 states with new materials being added weekly.  There are over 17,000 data sets, comprising over 4.5 million records online currently, and we expect that number will more than triple by year end.

The website at www.geothermaldata.org has a basic user interface that allows searching of the project catalog by keyword or bounding box, but a more sophisticated user interface was demonstrated yesterday by our collaborators at Boise State University and Siemens Corp.  It should be released for public use by the end of summer if not sooner.

We need to thank DOE's Arlene Anderson who saw the potential in our ideas on distributed data networks and had the faith to let us run with it.  She's become a thought leader in shared knowledge infrastructure. 


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