TOWARD A GLOBAL NETWORK OF INTEROPERABLE GEOANALYTICAL DATA RESOURCES - THE ONEGEOCHEMISTRY INITIATIVE

OneGeochemistry is an international collaboration between organizations that support geochemistry capability and data production. OneGeochemistry’s mission is to advance geoscientific knowledge and discoveries by building and maintaining consensus-driven standards and vocabularies that make geochemistry research data globally findable and accessible, and truly interoperable and reusable to both humans and machines. OneGeochemistry’s ultimate goal is to create a global geochemical data network that facilitates and promotes discovery of, and access to, geochemical data through coordination and collaboration among international geochemical data providers.

Based on the successful model of OneGeology, the OneGeochemistry initiative started as an informal network of a group of dedicated geochemists around the globe, representing national and international geochemistry data infrastructures. This informal group has now established an interim governance for the initiative and is participating in the WorldFAIR project, a major initiative of CODATA/RDA with partners from thirteen countries across Africa, Australasia, Europe, and North and South America that is supported by a grant from the European Commission. WorldFAIR aims to advance implementation of the FAIR data principles, in particular those for Interoperability, by developing a cross-domain interoperability framework and recommendations for FAIR assessment in a set of eleven disciplines or cross-disciplinary research areas. Through the WorldFAIR project, the interim board of OneGeochemistry is establishing an official, community-endorsed and thoroughly designed governance structure for the initiative. OneGeochemistry has started to engage with various stakeholders in the geoanalytical data ecosystem, including publishers, manufacturers of analytical instruments, funders, data standards organizations in relevant disciplines, and the broader research community. OneGeochemistry pursues the concept of a modular standard that builds on and harmonizes to the degree possible with global community standards such as Units of Measure (governed by CODATA and the International Science Council), the Periodic Table (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry), and rock names (International Union of Geosciences/MINDAT).