Data Submission Process

This page provides general guidelines for partners who will be submitting data to OpenTopography for hosting. Note that submitted data must meet our data hosting policy. Please contact OpenTopography before shipping data to us.

Data Submission Steps:

    1. Ship hard drive containing full set of data products to be hosted. In general, we prefer to receive the data in the same form as delivered by the vendor; thus, if you have the original hard drive upon which you received the data, please send us that. In addition to data products (point cloud file in LAZ (preferred) or LAS format and DEMs), please also ensure that all supporting files (survey polygons, flight line flies, tiling indexes, etc) are included on the hard drive. Finally, please send all metadata and report of survey documents associated with the dataset. OpenTopography’s mailing and shipping addresses can be found here. In some cases a network data transfer may be possible if the dataset is small enough. Make a copy of the data before sending it to avoid data loss due to a mishap with the hard drive while in transit.

    2. Complete the OpenTopography Data Description Worksheet (Word Doc) as completely as possible and return to OpenTopography via email or include it on the hard drive containing the data. We use the information you provide to craft the dataset access page, and the content you provide is important to ensure correct data overview language, logos, dataset acknowledgement language, etc.

    3. Once the dataset arrives at OpenTopography, we’ll review the dataset and accompanying metadata. We will follow up with you if we have questions or see issues that need to be resolved. Assuming there are no issues with the dataset, the data are added to our ingestion queue, and will be loaded as soon as possible. Typically we can have data online within a month, but often the process happens much faster.

    4. Once loaded, the dataset is made available through the OpenTopography Beta Portal. Once this happens, we’ll notify you that it is necessary to review the data access page, test the data delivery system, and to approve the dataset for release. The speed with which data can be released to the public through the production OpenTopography system relies upon this final review happening in a timely manner. Data will not be pushed to OT production until final approval by the data provider has been granted.

    5. Upon release of a dataset into the production OT system, a person(s) designated by the data provider (e.g., project PI, project manager, etc) will be granted access to an OpenTopography dashboard interface accessible through the myOpenTopo page to view real time statistics on data usage. Access to this dashboard requires an OpenTopography account.