Nearly 15 years ago, efforts were initiated to take advantage of the internet to integrate major digital geoscience data repositories to enable global sharing and interoperability of data. Early examples were GeosciNet – a global Geoinformatics Partnership, which was a collaboration between US and German databases (CoreWall, EarthChem, PaleoStrat, and the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP data system) (Snyder et al., 2008) and OneGeology, an international initiative of the National Geological Surveys and other geoscience organisations to provide access to global geoscience map data via web services underpinned by commonly used geodata standards (Jackson and Wyborn, 2008). Other consortia have emerged including: Council for Data Facilities (CDF) (especially the Shared Infrastructure Working Group), EarthCube,OneGeochemistry, EarthLife Consortium, International Federation of Digital Seismological Networks (FDSN), and many more. Despite ambitions, few have moved beyond bibliographic file discovery and downloads.
The drivers and goals to create online global data networks are still the same - the need to access science-ready, standardised, machine-actionable datasets from trusted repositories. Likewise, for repositories the challenges from ~2008 remain unchanged including:
Insufficient resources;
Technical diversity;
Social barriers & tensions;
Missing incentives;
Collaboration vs competition;
Lack of leadership and governance; and
Global implementation of new practices;.
Most efforts to date have been based around trying to create thematic data networks, but varying capabilities both within and between the source data repositories have proved a significant barrier to online data sharing. Often researchers, funders and publishers are clueless as to which ones offer longer term sustainability of Geoscience data assets and/or are compliant with the FAIR, CARE and TRUST principles.
This session will be an open forum on how we can best determine which repositories can currently participate in global geoscience networks and how we can uplift those that currently can’t but really want to, including ways to increase exchange of know-how and skills that will enable all geoscience repositories to potentially participate.
Jackson, I. and Wyborn, L., 2008. One planet: OneGeology? The Google Earth revolution and the geological data deficit. Environmental Geology, 53(6), pp.1377-1380. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00254-007-1085-z
Snyder, W.S., Lehnert, K.A., Ito, E., Harms, U. and Klump, J. 2008. GeosciNET: Building a global geoinformatics partnership. In Brady, S.R., Sinha, A.K., and Gundersen, L.C., eds., 2008, Proceedings, Geoinformatics 2008—Data to Knowledge, Potsdam, Germany, June 11–13, 2008: U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2008–5172, p 11-12. https://doi.org/10.3133/sir20085172
Value to Session Participants: An understanding of the critical importance of TRUSTed, FAIR and CARE compliant repositories in the global data sharing ecosystem that includes research activities, publication and long term curation and preservation of data assets.
