How do you manage, track, and share hydrologic data and models within your research group? Do you find it difficult to keep track of who has access to which data and who has the most recent version of a dataset or research product? Do you sometimes find it difficult to share data and models and collaborate with colleagues outside your home institution? Would it be easier if you had a simple way to share and collaborate around hydrologic datasets and models? HydroShare is a new, web-based system for sharing hydrologic data and models with specific functionality aimed at making collaboration easier. Within HydroShare, we have developed new functionality for creating datasets, describing them with metadata, and sharing them with collaborators. In HydroShare we cast hydrologic datasets and models as “social objects” that can be published, collaborated around, annotated, discovered, and accessed. In this presentation, we will discuss and demonstrate the collaborative and social features of HydroShare and how it can enable new, collaborative workflows for you, your research group, and your collaborators across institutions. HydroShare’s access control and sharing functionality enable both public and private sharing with individual users and collaborative user groups, giving you flexibility over who can access data and at what point in the research process. HydroShare can make it easier for collaborators to iterate on shared datasets and models, creating multiple versions along the way, and publishing them with a permanent landing page, metadata description, and citable Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Functionality for creating and sharing resources within collaborative groups can also make it easier to overcome barriers such as institutional firewalls that can make collaboration around large datasets difficult. Functionality for commenting on and rating resources supports community collaboration and quality evaluation of resources in HydroShare.

This presentation was delivered as part of a Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) Cyberseminar in June 2016. Cyberseminars are recorded, and archived recordings are available via the CUAHSI website at http://www.cuahsi.org.