Learning about Open Data Science & the Ocean Health Index
What is Open Data Science?
Open data science is a movement towards sharing data and standardizing methods of analysis to allow for reproducibility and transparency. By fostering collective knowledge amongst data scientists, we can bring new insights and solutions to the table at a quicker rate. Transparency coupled with user-friendly platforms allow the public or relevant stakeholders to interact with data that may be affecting their daily lives. At the Ocean Health Index, we prepare publically available data so that marine science practicioners and managers can tailor our methods to inform decision-making at the regional level.
Photo by Peter Fogden on Unsplash
The OHI Global Fellows!
The OHI Global Fellowship was created to familiarize a small group of interested students with the workings of the OHI — the theory, the tools, and the workflows the team employs to ensure the work is open, transparent and reproducible — while also testing the ease-of-use of training materials and the framework. With fresh eyes and the unique perspective of learning all this from scratch, we are in a position to offer perspective on questions like: How do we build familiarity with the tools, the processes, and methods used? What are some of the key stepping stones to understanding along the way?
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
Data science can be a difficult, confusing, quagmire but is such a crucial piece of being a modern environmental scientist, comprising many invaluable tools. How to make these tools understandable and accessible to people in the best position to leverage them for good, is a vital pedagogical question for modern era. The OHI is one of many such tools. As global fellows for the OHI, our mission should we choose to accept it is to help smooth the way for future users of OHI tools, while calculating the global health index for 2019. We are building this website as a resource, framed to provide future fellows a sense of the experience and what they will learn, and for anyone who is interested to see what we spend our days doing and how we work.
Our Progress
This site documents our experience learning about the Ocean Health Index (OHI) and the open data science practices used in calculating it. Our achievements, issues, problems, thoughts and comments throughout the process are chronicled here. The timeline measures our progress and records milemarkers on our OHI adventure (zoom in on completed tasks by scrolling over the timeline or using the top right buttons). We began learning the necessary tools on January 2019, and will finish calculating the global OHI scores for this calender year sometime late September.