CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE MAGNETICS INFORMATION CONSORTIUM MAGIC

The Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC) is dedicated to promoting information technology infrastructures for the international paleomagnetic and rock magnetic communities and includes a standard data model for archiving data that allows interoperable searches with other earth science databases, the capability for researchers to archive their own data in a freely accessible on-line database, search and visualization tools, and the capability to download data.

The desire to build MagIC grew from the realization that the achievement of specific scientific goals was inhibited by inadequacies in existing databases. These were divided into separate and largely incompatible databases for specific kinds of information (e.g., archeomagnetic, reversal transitions, or paleomagnetic poles). Data collected for one specific purpose may be useful for many others, hence MagIC has been designed to accommodate the full range of paleomagnetic and rock magnetic data into a single data model. Interoperability is built in to MagIC because it shares data tables describing locations, geological context, ages, and other information under EarthRef.org.

Magnetic studies tend to be interdisciplinary, and our users will take advantage of age and stratigraphic information archived in databases federated under CHRONOS, to assess chronological data quality via Earthtime, to understand how specific samples in MagIC relate to information found under EarthChem, and to link seamlessly to any site descriptions, physical, chemical, and preliminary magnetic data archived with ODP and IODP databases. The time has now come to build links to these and other databases and online tools such as GPlates, to provide paleogeographic information and linkages to diverse other modeling and analysis tools coordinated through the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics (CIG) group , and initiatives such as GEON.