ADAPTING CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE TOOLS AND RESOURCES TO EMPOWER A DATA-LITERATE WORKFORCE (Invited Presentation)

For over 30 years the intent of earth science cyberinfrastructure has been to organize, compile, and broadly serve highly specialized datasets in the service of exploring expansive questions about our planet’s systems. Technological advances have increased the volume of data and democratized its access, thus moving data ownership norms away from the colonial legacy toward a more egalitarian framework. We are careening toward an AI revolution where compiling, querying, and handling of data will inevitably become more automated. Training a diverse workforce that has facility in teaching, learning, and working with data is therefore becoming ever more important and our success as educators rests on providing resources that further the mission of equitable access to the data and critical handling of AI-assisted outputs. By availing practitioners with multiple means of access to real-world, heterogeneous, sample-based data and their associated metadata we can equip students and trainees with career flexibility in a rapidly evolving economic and technological landscape. We will present ongoing work in collaboration with the NSF-sponsored Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA2) data facility, which administers EarthChem (data services for geochemical, geochronological, and petrological data), the Library for Experimental Phase Relations and Trace Element Distribution (LEPR-TraceDs), and the System for Earth Sample Registration (SESAR2) to re-envision solid earth geochemistry cyberinfrastructure resources as tools that move our practitioners beyond data prowess in geosciences toward data prowess in any discipline.