THE PROMISE OF CHRONOS

A major challenge for geoscience cyberinfrastructure is to develop an effective approach to working across traditional discipline and organizational boundaries. It is relatively easy to speak of such cooperation, such “interoperability”, but perhaps another thing to actually implement a viable approach. CHRONOS is one of these efforts, and it targets broad community participation that focuses on uniting terrestrial-based and marine-based data sets and tools dealing with time series analysis (time scale), paleontology and stratigraphy. But it cannot do it alone, does not want to do so, nor should it. There are other efforts that will participate in this collaboration, for example: PetDB, the MARGINS databases, JANUS, GEON, NAVDAT, etc., as well as upcoming efforts such as SedDB and others. Furthermore, because our science is global in nature, our cyberinfrastructure efforts must be international in scope. That means working with international researchers and organizations to build a global network of interoperable systems.

We have all had the experience of trying to merge our newly generated dataset with legacy data accessible only in the literature or someone’s filing cabinet. And we have generally faced long searches in the library as we tried to track down a specific paper or the work of a specific scientist. Conflicting formats, lack of metadata, etc. could easily frustrate or complicate our efforts. CHRONOS envisions a future in which extensive datasets are available to all of us instantly and in which we have visualization tools that would make such comparisons much simpler and, potentially, more powerful.

As geoscientists have developed substantially more extensive and more accessible observational datasets, we have seen a flowering of ideas about processes and events unknown a few years ago. The future interoperability of such datasets brings the promise that geoscientists routinely place their research in an Earth system context and that we will dramatically expand our understanding of the extensive interconnections between Earth subsystems. This is a future in which we all should participate.