Providing provenance to instruments through the US global change information system

The Global Change Information System was created by the US Global Change Research Program to provide specialists and the general public with accessible and usable global change related information. This system uses a relational and semantic web approach to describe the detailed provenance of global change information, such as “in report x, figure y is derived from dataset z”. The system supported the development of the US Third National Climate Assessment, which was released in May 2014 and improves our understanding of climate change in the US. Over the last year, a partnership has been developed with the Committee on Earth Observing Satellites and now their database of missions, instruments and observations is being used to provide traceability to the specific platforms and instruments that support the assessment´s findings and figures.