Create Data Portals

You can now easily view related datasets all in one place.

Table of Contents

What is a Portal?

A portal is a collection of private or public datasets on a unique webpage. This webpage also supports additional text pages for describing any aspect of the data collection.

Typically, a research project's website won't be maintained beyond the life of the project and all the information on the website that provides context for the data collection is lost. ESS-DIVE portals can provide a means to preserve information regarding the project's objectives, scopes, and organization and couple this with project datasets so it's clear how to use and interpret the data for years to come.

Portals also leverage ESS-DIVE's metric feature, which create statistics describing the project's datasets. Information such as number of datasets, total size of data, data collection time periods, views, downloads, and citations are immediately available from the portal webpage.

Components of a Portal

Click through the sections below to learn about the four types of tabs in data portals.

Settings Tab

The first component of portals is the settings tab. This tab is the first page you will see after initially creating a new portal and sets up important infrastructure for the portal. On this page you can give the portal a title and assign it a unique url; also referred to as a portal identifier. You can add a general description of the portal, upload an icon photo or logo for your data, and upload icon photos from any partner organizations that have contributed to the data.These partner icons will appear in the footer banner on every page in a portal, likewise your portal icon will appear in the header banner.

Every ESS-DIVE portal URL will follow this format: https://data.ess-dive.lbl.gov/portals/<portal_identifier>/

Portal Uses

There are two primary use cases for collecting datasets into data portals:

  1. Datasets related to the same research theme

  2. All datasets published by an ESS project

Note: Only registered Data Contributors can create data portals on ESS-DIVE

Terminology check: A Data Contributor is someone who has prior approval to upload data on ESS-DIVE and has registered themselves as a Data Contributor with the ESS-DIVE Team.

Research Themed Portals

Data Contributors can use portals to collect public data and create a research-themed webpage. This curated data collection will have data available for direct download, can provide insights about the significance of the collection, and can be shared with colleagues and broad audiences.

ESS Project Portals

Projects can collect their project-specific datasets into a unique portal and customize the portal's theme and structure according to the needs of that project. Portals enable projects to preserve their identity on ESS-DIVE as well as their data.

A project portal can use freeform pages to include information about:

  • The project, funding program, and project partners

  • Purpose of the project data

  • Significant paper citations

  • Authors bios

For projects, portals can also be used to report on performance by leveraging the metric feature (click here to see an example of portal metrics). Important statistics about the project's data are tracked on the metrics page including total data publications, number of data views and downloads, and the time span of data collection across the project.

Currently, project-based portals can only be linked to a single individual's ESS-DIVE account. The current infrastructure does not support project-based or group accounts.

All public data portals are accessible via ESS-DIVE's Portal page.

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