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. The SDC is a research environment which allows users to conduct analysis, develop, and test new tools or software products, while collaborating and sharing code with other system users.

The SDC 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 currently ingests several datasets. Additional data sets will be added to the environment over time. Users can bring their own data into the environment to use along with platform 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 SDC, enabling data analytics in the cloud.

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

Roles

Data Providers: These are entities that provide data hosted on the SDC. The data provider establishes the data protection needs and acceptable use terms for the data analysts (see “Data Agreement” section for more details - DP Guide: Chapter 6, Data Discovery and Documentation | Data Agreement ).

Researchers: These are users that conduct analysis of the datasets hosted on the SDC. Note that researchers can bring their own data and tools into the SDC system.

This document provides guidance for data providers.

A similar guide has been prepared for the researchers which can be accessed here: RT Guide: Researchers' User Guide