GUIDING DEVELOPMENT OF A GEOSCIENCE-FOCUSED SEMANTIC WEB APP: END-USER ENGAGEMENT IN THE EARTHCOLLAB PROJECT

EarthCollab, an EarthCube Building Block, is working to address connectivity gaps across distributed networks of researchers and resources. To determine how researchers discover and share data, we surveyed members of two multidisciplinary communities: (1) UNAVCO, a geodetic facility and consortium that supports diverse research projects informed by geodesy, and (2) the Bering Sea Project, an interdisciplinary field program whose data archive is hosted by NCAR’s Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL).

The survey indicated that community members prefer to discover data by visiting data center websites rather than through published literature, Google (or another search engine), or by asking a colleague, whereas they primarily use a search engine to find people and publications. Participants were also asked which information they think should be included on a professional profile. A majority of survey takers consider contact information, publications, and affiliated institutions to be very important, while most consider society memberships, social media links, and course lists to be non-essential or not appropriate. When asked to rank the most important research products to be displayed, datasets received the highest ranking, with algorithms and software following closely.

The survey responses will inform our customization of VIVO, an existing open source semantic web application. A wealth of community information has been ingested into VIVO by UNAVCO; datasets, community members and their publications, abstracts, and institutional information have been added, and the relationships between them explicitly defined. Next, we will begin task-centered usability testing to determine how the VIVO application can be further tailored to a geoscience-centered use case.