EARTH SCIENCE REFERENCE DATA AND EARTHREF.ORG

The EarthRef.org web resource uses the vision of a “global reference model” to provide an Information Technology (IT) infrastructure for the Earth sciences. This emphasizes the marriage of the “scientific process” (and its results) with the development of a general cyber-infrastructure in the Earth sciences. Such an approach is essential in the design of research databases, their metadata needs and semantic linkages. Much attention has been paid to these issues while designing EarthRef.org to be optimized for sharing and linking data in an interdisciplinary approach to databases.

Eight databases reside under EarthRef.org: (1) the Geochemical Earth Reference Model (GERM) database contains geochemical abundance data for reservoirs in the Earth; (2) the partition coefficient database contains Kd estimates for various rock-types and minerals; (3) the seamount catalog archives maps, grid files and multibeam data for seamounts; (4) the Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC) databases contain analytical data for paleo- and rock-magnetism; (5) the Radiometric Age Database (RAD) contains analytical data for isotope geochronology and is interlinked with the CHRONOS timescale on the web; (6) the EarthRef Digital Archive (ERDA) holds any digital object as uploaded by scientists for free; (7) the EarthRef Reference Database (ERR) holds more than 1,000 publications including PDF images of the abstracts, data tables, methods and appendices, together with their digitized contents in Microsoft Word and Excel formats; (8) the EarthRef Address Book (ERAB) contains contact information for all EarthRef.org contributors, authors, sample archivers and analysts. Other scientists who want to have his/her address listed in this online address book can do this for free.

Since 2000 EarthRef.org has been active in the development of metadata concepts and formats for geochemistry and the Earth sciences. Main points of these concepts include a logical structure (for Earth scientists) and a modular nature of the metadata that provides access to these data from a range of search types, such as location, rock-type, tectonic setting or relevance to a particular expert level (K-12, college, research). This work has resulted in publications that are now available at http://earthref.org/metadata/GERM/.