Dr. Jason Duke, Chief Data Officer at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, speaks with Adita Karkera, Deloitte Chief Data Officer for Government and Public Services, about the importance of metadata, the Enterprise Data Inventory, FAIR principles of data management, and creating metadata for the masses.

As a CDO, Duke believes that metadata is the building block of every structure, and he works to get metadata catalogs and repositories. The process includes collecting metadata, getting a metadata catalog, and getting copies of data from an approved repository.

Further, Duke states that the Department of the Interior has introduced an initiative called Enterprise Data Inventory and Enterprise Data Governance. He shares the Enterprise Data Inventory is a tool used by the 11 bureaus within the Department of the Interior to feed metadata into a larger catalog. The data from the metadata is then fed into data.gov.

Adding on, Duke maintains that the Enterprise Data Inventory is an effort by the Department of the Interior to standardize metadata attributes that are imported from various sources. This helps to ensure that the metadata meets the requirements to be fed into data.gov.

Duke’s efforts are focused on getting all bureaus to standardize the collection of metadata, allowing them to access information more easily. This also facilitates access for the public to quality metadata so they know what the government is doing, he adds.

Moving forward, he discusses the FAIR data principles, which stand for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Duke emphasizes that all four of these principles are equally important and need to be taken into consideration to ensure success.

To make data findable, he advocates for the creation and collection of metadata that can be put into a catalog. To make data accessible, he suggests considering data warehouses and repositories, as well as making sure there is sufficient bandwidth in rural places such as wildlife refuges.

Regarding interoperability, Duke stresses the importance of data sharing and uniformly collaborating with others, to better enhance the data. He then notes that reusability comes after data is made interoperable so that it can be shared and accessed.

The medical and pharmaceutical industries are big proponents of FAIR. Furthermore, Duke suggests that the FAIR principles for data management are world-renowned and have influenced the creation of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act. He explains that when managing data, it is sometimes appropriate to prioritize reusability over findability given the existing data sets, and one need not use all four principles in the same sync.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service uses the Fair Principles to guide its data management decision.  Thereafter, Duke underscores that the most important thing to keep in mind when working with data is to be open to learning from anyone. He suggests that data leaders should not limit themselves to people who are from a certain field, such as IT or data science. Instead, they should also consider input from experts in other fields like ecology, hydrology, and botany.

Regarding data management, Duke believes that data is merely collected from other individuals’ production and used to make something better. As such, he asserts that organizations do not actually manage the data but rather the processes around it. He urges people to have an open mind to make the most of what is available instead of worrying about AI and ML or speculating about future scenarios.

In conclusion, Duke reveals that he is looking at a solution to create metadata for the masses that would be secure in the “magic catalog.” To make it easier to create metadata, he is developing a form-based solution that will provide help screens and examples. It is intended to make it easy and efficient for people to create metadata.

Through this, he hopes to show the utility of metadata to the Fish and Wildlife Service. While Duke recognizes that he may not be able to convince everyone to love metadata, he is striving to make the task of creating metadata much simpler.

CDO Magazine appreciates Jason Duke for sharing his data stories with our global community.