Case Study: Implementing Data Governance Using a Knowledge Graph Approach
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
08:15 AM - 09:00 AM
Case Study
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
Roshelle has 27 years of experience working with data in the federal government. Since 2004, she has been a data management leader within the complex interagency wildland fire community. This includes five federal agencies in two departments, 59 states and territories, and hundreds of county and city governments. In 2013, Roshelle was the business lead for the implementation of a data integration system for operational data that facilitated a cultural shift toward managing data instead of applications. Roshelle accepted the Associate Chief Data Officer position in 2019 and is formalizing the Wildland Fire Data Management Program, including full-time staff to implement and manage a semantic data governance tool. Roshelle’s approach focuses on using data to bridge the space between business needs and IT program implementation in a collaborative and sustainable way.
Nimit Mehta is the CEO of TopQuadrant, the applied knowledge graph collaboration platform. Its flagship product, EDG, brings life to metadata to solve the most important safety, security, and discovery problems for the world's largest organizations. It seamlessly connects teams, technology, and processes with a unique belief in shared knowledge to give a voice to the most valuable enterprise assets - the unsung, often overlooked, heroes who lead through data. Prior to TopQuadrant, Nimit guided ascendant technologies through the challenges of rapid growth as an operating executive, entrepreneur, and investor. Nimit holds degrees from Stanford and Columbia and speaks often on the importance of communicating the value of complex technologies, simply.