INTEGRATED DATA SERVICES FOR THE EARTH AND OCEAN SCIENCES: THE MARINE GEOSCIENCE DATA SYSTEM AND THE GEOINFORMATICS FOR GEOCHEMISTRY PROGRAM

Data sets collected in support of earth science research provide fundamental characterization of our global environment, including irreplaceable observations of earth's dynamic properties, and are of high value for preservation. The Marine Geoscience Data System (MGDS, www.marine-geo.org) and the Geoinformatics for Geochemistry Program (GfG, www.geoinfogeochem.org) develop, maintain, and operate community-driven data collections that support the preservation, discovery, retrieval, and analysis of a wide range of observational field and analytical data types from the marine and terrestrial environments, among them the PetDB database, the EarthChem data network, the Ridge2000 and MARGINS databases, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Data System (ASODS), the Global Multi Resolution Topography Synthesis, and the System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR).

MGDS and GfG systems have been developed based on an active understanding of the practices, needs, and concerns of their user communities, through an open and responsive dialog, engaging investigators in the design of the systems, seeking their feedback, and educating the community about responsibilities and benefits of scientific data management and sharing. They have initiated and continue to proactively drive the development of community standards and best practices for data submission, data publication, data documentation, and data archiving, engaging funding agencies, editors, publishers, professional societies, and researchers to achieve broad community support and advance implementation.

The systems are operated under a joint Project Execution Plan that defines operational principles and practices, including data quality control, risk and contingency management, and strategies for long-term sustainability. New shared services will substantially enhance the utility of all data collection components, while improving interoperability and efficiency of operations, and will include an on-line service to improve ease of data submission across our user communities, a data publication service for scientists to publish their datasets with citable universal identifiers, and operational services for shared vocabularies and to ease registration of common expeditions and geochemical datasets across our two systems.