ODL project helping WSDOT bridge gap between data and knowledge
The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) is a huge organization, with more than 6,300 employees in several divisions and across every region of the state. And WSDOT isn’t just concerned with roads; the organization is focused on multimodal transportation — walking, biking, trains, ferries, buses, and more — just about any way you can think of to move people or goods from here to there.
You can imagine that, in any large, diverse organization with numerous partnerships, sharing information and data effectively is an essential and challenging task. And, you can imagine that tons of information and data remain undiscovered, whether isolated within a particular group or lacking the proper metadata to allow people and machines to know what they are — or even that they exist. So, while WSDOT does an admirable job making in-depth data such as traffic, crash, and roadway statistics available, there is room to improve knowledge management internally and in communication with the public.
One tool that WSDOT uses internally in this endeavor is Data or Term Search (DOTS), which is managed by the Data Management Services (DMS) group. At its heart, DOTS is a data catalog: an inventory of all of the data objects within DMS-managed environments, along with technical metadata for those objects. Because naming conventions for these data objects have varied over time, DOTS goes a step further, linking data objects to a taxonomy of business metadata that has the potential to:
- Unify data objects with different physical names but the same conceptual meaning (e.g., the column names “PersonnelID,” “EmployeeID,” and “EmpID” have the same meaning).
- Help data experts promote technical metadata consistency across the business.
- Help those who aren’t data experts understand business concepts, discover if there are data objects linked to those concepts, and discover how to learn more or how to access that data.
While DOTS has proven valuable for the data-expert audience (Items 1 and 2 above), it has fallen short in regards to those who aren’t data experts (Item 3), as it does not provide clear business context or a clear pathway to learn more about the content represented by that physical data.
That limitation is the starting point of my focus this summer as an intern at WSDOT. In collaboration with technical and business stakeholders, I am conducting initial work for a full business analysis of DOTS. The analysis, once complete, will help data and domain experts deliver greater benefit to knowledge seekers through improvements to DOTS and related information-sharing processes.
This work also carries open data implications. Considerations of the needs of the diverse, internal WSDOT user base — largely made up of those who aren’t data experts — should be extensible to design that meets open data needs. Additionally, better understanding of the data and metadata inventoried by DOTS will help WSDOT stakeholders more effectively determine what data can, and should, be published as open data.
I’ve spent a couple of weeks thus far discovering DOTS and learning more about WSDOT. Now, in concert with stakeholders, I’ve taken a step back from the tool to consider the information and data needs of the organization, starting this week with interviews of three WSDOT librarians. This work will help stakeholders begin to answer the question of where DOTS fits into a solution that meets those needs.
