GEOSCINET - A GLOBAL GEOINFORMATICS PARTNERSHIP

GeosciNET is an emerging partnership of existing geoinformatics organizations that are collaborating to provide a more effective data system. Current members are: CoreWall (www.corewall.org), Geoinformatics for Geochemistry (GfG; www.geoinfogeochem.org), System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR; www.geosamples.org ), PaleoStrat (www.paleostrat.org), and the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP; www.icdp-online.org). With the existing membership, GeosciNET can offer a comprehensive, integrated system for data acquisition in the field, data dissemination, archiving, visualization, and data integration and analysis. The system will enable a single researcher or a group of collaborators to keep track of, visualize and virtually archive any type of geologic sample and data produced from that sample and subsamples taken from the original sample. Samples can be solid, liquid or gas, be from an outcrop or drilled or dug from a pit, or may even be virtual (e.g., spectral analysis of an outcrop of satellite photo).

GeosciNET is envisioned as a model to advance the larger, ongoing process to build a global geoinformatics system and is open to new partners that would expand the scope and impact of the partnership. Lehnert and others (2008) stressed that geoinformatics needs to be developed as a linked system of sites that provide to users a library of research data and tools to discover and access, integrate, manipulate, analyze and model interdisciplinary data, without corrupting the original data. The "grand challenge" for geoinformatics is to build such a linked system. Enforced networking of geoinformatics systems (the ‘top-down' approach) has not been perceived well by academics that tend to value bottom-up systems that can be more responsive to users' needs. There are major roadblocks to building networks within government and academic domains as well as between them partly because of perceived differences in their respective modes of operation and inadequate funding. Few links exist today among various geoinformatics efforts, so it is difficult for anyone to know where various data are (data discovery), to integrate them (interoperability), and to view diverse data in a synthetic and dynamic way (visualization). GeosciNET's aim is to lower the obstacles for users to take advantage of geoinformatics resources and value its promises. Once these benefits are understood by the user community, the barriers that currently exist in building a larger geoinformatics system will start to erode.

We are organizing GeosciNET to advance coordination, complementarity, and interoperability, and minimize duplication of efforts and overlap of scope among the involved partner systems in order to streamline the development and operation of geoinformatics efforts. We believe that by advancing the development and data holdings of its member groups, the overall value of each site will be significantly enhanced and better meet the needs of the users. We are jointly developing a plan that outlines the interaction among the projects and their specific responsibilities for building a network of data, services, and tools. Our goal is to establish an integrated, apparently seamless network that can be offered to the community of users to support science and education programs. This collaboration is based on a Memorandum of Understanding predicated on the idea of mutual benefit. Specific responsibilities of partner projects are based on maximizing this mutual benefit and the technical capabilities of the partners. For example the Antarctic Drilling Program (ANDRILL), ICDP and others are working with CoreWall to enhance technologies that can then be implemented by their projects. One key need that has been identified by the user community is for CoreWall to be able to push data out to other databases, including, but not restricted to PaleoStrat and those of GfG. PaleoStrat is partnering with the International Congress on Carboniferous and Permian (ICCP), the Permian and Carboniferous Subcommissions of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), and GeoSystems (www.geosystems.org) to support the newly formed "Upper Paleozoic Paleoclimate Working Group." EarthChem (www.earthchem.org), which is a core part of GfG, is building a Geochemistry Information Network and has established a consortium of international partners with the goal to access to globally distributed collections of geochemical data via the EarthChem Portal. All of these activities will enhance the effectiveness of all GeosciNET partners.

A major focus for GeosciNET is to support individual researchers and projects that do not have their own dedicated data management and education and outreach programs. One of the greatest challenges for geoinformatics lies in being perceived as a friendly resource by its users where they can easily link their observations and analyses and integrate them with other data. These data, when viewed holistically, provide a continuum of information that allows the geoscience community to address, often uniquely, fundamental questions of Earth processes. They can provide us with information about the environment or natural resources that we did not know we had, or questions we did not know to ask.

Despite the importance of data (legacy or otherwise), there are currently no convenient mechanisms that enable users to easily input their data into databases. While some efforts such as GfG databases PetDB and SedDB have worked hard to compile such data, only users' active participation can capture the major part of the overall legacy and of new data. User participation requires the proper tools such as a translator than can recognize tags and parse the data accordingly, and incentives such as tools and more data for enhanced data synthesis and analysis. GeosciNET will be experimenting with these mechanisms. Efficient capture of legacy and new digital data is part of the larger data preservation grand challenge that include physical samples; there are many government and academic core and sample repositories that can benefit from SESAR, CoreWall and other components of GeosciNET.

Lehnert, K.A., Harms, U., Ito, U., Klump, J., and Snyder, W.S., 2008, Promises, Achievements, and Challenges of Networking Global Geoinformatics Resources - Experiences of GeosciNET and EarthChem, Geophysical Research Abstracts, Vol. 10, EGU2008-A-05242, 2008, European Geoscience Union General Assembly 2008.