Regional Data Sharing: Data Warehouses and Early Steps Toward Regional Systems

The Pacific Northwest has a long history of using database technology to consolidate data across multiple agencies to support a variety of management, monitoring and research activities.  Examples of some regional-scale database projects include the Pacific Fisheries Information Network (PACFIN), which consolidates marine harvest data on the west coast to support marine fishery management; the PIT Tag Information System (PITAGIS), which manages PIT tag data in the Columbia River basin; the Regional Mark Information System (RMIS), which manages coded wire tag data for the west coast; and StreamNet, which consolidates and standardizes interior fisheries data across the Columbia basin and the Pacific Northwest.  These projects have functioned for decades and in general utilize a regional scale data warehouse approach based on relational database management technology and Internet based online data query systems for disseminating the data.  In recent years, interest in more interactive approaches to regional scale data management has been growing.  Drivers of that interest include a desire to access data directly from source agencies, interest in acquiring data in real time, maintaining local control over data, and utilizing the power of newer technologies like GIS.  Attempts to build systems in the Columbia Basin to achieve these newer goals have met with only limited success, so far, largely due to limited Web access to data from the originating agencies.  Fundamentally, the newer technologies have outstripped the current capabilities of agencies to share data via the Web.  New tools now make it possible to expand the ways data can be accessed and displayed, increase linkage between formerly disparate data sets, allow simultaneous acquisition of similar data from multiple sources, and provide nearly instantaneous access to real time data.  Implementation of new approaches and technologies will require completion of comprehensive database systems within agencies, wide scale agreement on which data should be shared, posting metadata and data as web services, and adjustment to policies and procedures within agencies.  To be most effective, this new development should build from existing capabilities, utilizing what currently exists and is successful, and applying new technologies to expand capabilities to meet growing needs for integrated data on a broad scale.  Efforts are now underway to increase database infrastructure within the agencies that create fisheries data and to develop additional data sharing strategies and capabilities.  These efforts are taking place in a collaborative environment, as will be described in this symposium.