THE EARTHCUBE INITIATIVE - 2018 AND BEYOND

EarthCube is an NSF program started in 2011 to better enable geoscience research through cyberinfrastructure for data availability and access. The goal is to improve science workflows, especially for data discovery, access, analysis and visualization, for individual domain scientists and multidisciplinary teams, to transform how data-intensive geoscience research is conducted. The long-term vision is to develop interoperable geo-wide capabilities to tackle important research questions in complex, dynamic Earth System processes, building out from existing infrastructure, developing and promoting standards, and educating geoscientists on their adoption. As a community-driven and community-governed effort, with support from the NSF GEO Directorate and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, the program spent much of its initial years building a community, exploring ways to address these goals, building demonstration components, and refining our understanding of science workflows across geoscience domains. More than 60 projects have been supported in its first 5 years. During this time, parallel developments in other NSF directorates, Data Repositories, and elsewhere (e.g., the ESIP community) have raised general awareness of geosciences data needs and best practices. A good example is the FAIR initiative, where data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The EarthCube Leadership Council, in consultation with stakeholders, has outlined three priority activities for 2018 and beyond: (a) Scientist Engagement and Science Advancement; (b) Registries for Resource Integration and Reuse; and (c) Scientific Workflow and Data Support. In partnership with upcoming NSF Geo domain data science workshops, and with hopes to partner with the new NSF-wide Harnessing the Data Revolution initiative, EarthCube is emerging as a central hub to support geoscience and geoinformatics community data needs, to work with other similar entities to engage scientists to learn about and support their data needs, to drive development and implementation of standards through registries and aligned data facilities, and to lower the barrier for scientists to participate in data-intensive projects in all forms. EarthCube’s future plans and examples of current and completed efforts will be discussed.