EODP: ADAPTING EXISTING DATABASE STRUCTURES TO WORK WITH SCIENTIFIC OCEAN DRILLING DATA (Invited Presentation)

Scientific ocean drilling, through the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and its predecessors, has produced vast quantities of data revolutionizing many geoscience subdisciplines. Much of that data, however, is dispersed into a variety of bespoke databases. Of key importance is the lack of a resource that collates marine stratigraphy and the age, deposition, and fossil composition of the ~435 km of scientific ocean drilling cores. Having that data processed and located in a central repository would be an obvious boon to the research community, allowing for both its scientific use and as a stratigraphic nexus upon which to mount other research initiatives. Extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits (eODP) is an NSF EarthCube-funded project seeking to facilitate access to, and aid visualization of, these large ocean datasets. To do this we are leveraging two established resources, the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) and Macrostrat, and collaborating with Open Core Data and NeptuneSandBox.

Having acquired funding in late 2019-early 2020, we will share in this presentation what we’ve learned, discuss standards and practices, and structural concerns raised thus far. A fundamental issue is that scientific ocean drilling data are held within several unconnected databases, largely corresponding to which program generated the data. For example, Deep Sea Drilling Project-era data are maintained by NOAA in .html tables, whereas the current IODP database, LIMS, produces a variety of file types that are accessed via an API (application programming interface). In order to standardize stratigraphic and fossil occurrence data into a unified format, an intermediate platform (called the ‘Baggage Stripper’) is being built to standardize across the disparate sources, preserve the data as it was collected during cruises, and cross-walk to the PBDB and Macrostrat. Other efforts have included QA/QC on these data and determining how the PBDB and Macrostrat need to be modified to handle ocean drilling data.