MARS: A MIDDLEWARE THAT ASSISTS IN THE REGISTRATION OF PHYSICAL SAMPLE METADATA WITH SESAR

MARS (Middleware for Assisting the Registration of Samples) is a tool that helps map metadata describing material samples in personal or institutional collections and sample catalogs to the metadata required for registering samples with the System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR), the primary US Allocating Agent for the IGSN Global Sample Number. Obtaining IGSNs as globally unique and persistent identifiers for samples is increasingly adopted as a best practice in collection management to ensure tracking of samples through their life cycle and linking of samples with data and publications. MARS was developed through a collaboration among the College of Charleston (CofC), Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and SESAR. The substantial burden for collection curators wanting to obtain IGSNs is that, currently, registering samples with SESAR requires the manual transfer of sample metadata from local databases to SESAR’s Batch Registration template. The use of MARS to assist in registering samples drastically cuts down on effort and time required for sample registration. The initial collaboration among CofC, SIO and SESAR focused on mapping SIO’s data format to SESAR’s required data format. SIO uses the metadata schema of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS), a database that aggregates sample metadata from about thirty different core and sample repositories. In order to broaden its utility and impact and help register samples not only across the marine and lake core communities but across different disciplines, MARS will develop a Map Maker that allows it to map data in any format, using any vocabulary, to SESAR’s data format. This Map Maker service has the potential to register a huge number of physical samples so that the samples themselves are discoverable, as well as any data produced from the samples. At the 2020 Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Summer Meeting, MARS gained the interest and support of several new groups, including geological and water surveys. MARS middleware and the Map Maker are developed solely by undergraduate students at the College of Charleston, overseen by their advisor Dr. Jim Bowring.