WORLD DATA CENTER FOR PALEOCLIMATOLOGY: INTEGRATING HETEROGENEOUS TYPES OF DATA

The last five years have seen an explosion in the amount and types of geoscience data shared via the Internet. New technologies and protocols for data management promise to make the coming decade even more exciting in terms of the way scientific data are shared electronically. NOAA’s World Data Center for Paleoclimatology has participated in this data revolution, archiving and distributing data at an exponentially increasing rate, and serving a diverse user community that ranges from scientists to students to policy makers. Several factors contributed to the Center’s early success: an emphasis on national and international partners to identify needs and priorities in data management, and the formation of data cooperatives consisting of small teams of scientists who volunteered their time to develop or refine data sets. The co-ops have played a key role in producing high quality, discipline-specific databases by keeping the decisions and quality control in the hands of experts who are most familiar with specific types of data. A third factor was the quick adoption of internationally recognized protocols for data management, such as the policy of free and open access to scientific data, and the use of standard data types and formats for data archive and exchange. One of the challenges facing the program (and most other data centers) today is how to make it easier for the users to integrate different types of data. From a practical perspective, integration involves providing data in formats that are intuitive and easy to use. From the perspective of content, the goal is to provide sufficient information so that the data can be used successfully by scientists from different disciplines, or with specific requirements, such as GIS users who require spatial reference information. Several different strategies and approaches used by the Center to make data easier to integrate will be presented.