Introduction and Document Overview

The Secure Data Commons (SDC) is a United States Department of Transportation (U.S DOT)
sponsored cloud-based analytical sandbox designed to create wider access to sensitive
transportation data sets, with the goal of advancing the state of the art of transportation research
and state/local traffic management.

The SDC stores sensitive transportation data made available by participating data providers, and
grants access to approved researchers to these datasets. The SDC also provides access to opensource tools, and allow researchers to collaborate and share code with other system users.

The SDC platform is a research environment that allows users to conduct analyses and do
development and testing of new tools and software products. It is not intended to be an
alternative to any local jurisdiction’s traffic management center or local data repository. The
existing SDC provides users with the following data, tools, and features:

Data: The SDC is ingesting several datasets currently. Additional data sets will be added
to the environment over time. Users can bring their own data into the environment to use
along with the Waze data.

Tools: The environment provides access to open source tools including Python, RStudio,
Microsoft R, SQL Workbench, Power BI, and Jupyter Notebook. These tools are
available on a virtual machine in the system enabling data analytics in the cloud.

Functionality: Users can access and analyze data within the environment, save their work
to a virtual machine, and publish processes and results to share with others

The SDC platform supports two major roles:

Data Providers: These are entities that provide data hosted on the SDC platform. The data
provider establishes the data protection needs and acceptable use terms for the data
analysts.
Data Analysts: These are entities that conduct analysis of the datasets hosted in the SDC
system. Note that analysts can bring their own data and tools into the SDC system.
This document provides guidance for the data provider role.

A similar guide has been prepared for the data analysts which can be accessed by clicking RT Guide: Researchers' User Guide