Case study: Implementing date governance using a knowledge graph approach

USA – The Wildland Fire Information and Technology Program of the USDA Forest Service and the Department of the Interior is implementing a broad data management and governance initiative in order to facilitate better communication and collaboration within the wildland fire community. That community involves numerous interagency federal, state, and local programs for strategically reducing vegetation to limit its availability to fuel a wildfire.

The data governance initiative encompasses an agency-wide data registry to catalog datasets and data sources (e.g., relational databases), manage glossaries of terms, and provide support for stewardship, ownership, and intra-agency collaboration. These data elements and related terminology reflect our collective knowledge in a given subject area.

In this talk, we will cover how Wildland Fire is establishing a data governance structure, the process to achieve these goals, and some important lessons learned so far:

• Developing ontologies that reflect our business requires assessing our assumptions about our business
• The importance of being able to capture items that are simple (e.g., glossary terms) as well as very complex (e.g., stakeholder agreements and project management)
• Lessons learned about how to best represent complex enterprise assets, such as organizations, positions, training, and policies, and relate them to data
• The value of a graph view to shift culture toward a data-centric enterprise