Facilitating and Improving Environmental Research Data Repository Interoperability

Environmental research data repositories provide much needed services for data preservation and data dissemination to diverse communities with domain specific or programmatic data needs and standards. Due to independent development these repositories serve their communities well, but were developed with different technologies, data models and using different ontologies. Hence, the effectiveness and efficiency of these services can be vastly improved if repositories work together adhering to a shared community platform that focuses on the implementation of agreed upon standards and best practices for curation and dissemination of data. Such a community platform drives forward the convergence of technologies and practices that will advance cross-domain interoperability. It will also facilitate contributions from investigators through standardized and streamlined workflows and provide increased visibility for the role of data managers and the curation services provided by data repositories, beyond preservation infrastructure. Ten specific suggestions for such standardizations are outlined without any suggestions for priority or technical implementation. Although the recommendations are for repositories to implement, they have been chosen specifically with the data provider/data curator and synthesis scientist in mind

Facilitating and Improving Environmental Research Data Repository Interoperability

Environmental research data repositories provide much needed services for data preservation and data dissemination to diverse communities with domain specific or programmatic data needs and standards. Due to independent development these repositories serve their communities well, but were developed with different technologies, data models and using different ontologies. Hence, the effectiveness and efficiency of these services can be vastly improved if repositories work together adhering to a shared community platform that focuses on the implementation of agreed upon standards and best practices for curation and dissemination of data. Such a community platform drives forward the convergence of technologies and practices that will advance cross-domain interoperability. It will also facilitate contributions from investigators through standardized and streamlined workflows and provide increased visibility for the role of data managers and the curation services provided by data repositories, beyond preservation infrastructure. Ten specific suggestions for such standardizations are outlined without any suggestions for priority or technical implementation. Although the recommendations are for repositories to implement, they have been chosen specifically with the data provider/data curator and synthesis scientist in mind

Workflow Recommendations for Enabling FAIR Data in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences

As a part of the Enabling FAIR Data project led by the American Geophysical Union, the "Workflow Recommendations Between Data Repositories and Publishers" Targeted Adoption Group adopted and adapted work developed originally by the THOR project, funded by the European Union.  These workflows define the activities and handoffs between scientific repositories and scholarly journals to link manuscripts/publications with the supporting data and other research products. We successfully adopted workflows built by the THOR project (https://project-thor.eu)  for linking data with scholarly literature to ensure a common process across the stakeholder ecosystem.  By using the work of THOR we avoided a lengthy research effort and could move directly into determining a solution.</p

Beyond Discovery: Cross-Platform Application of Ecological Metadata Language in Support of Quality Assurance and Control

Metadata may be generally understood to support discovery and performance of bibliographic functions against a given resource or set of resources. For example, a limited set of basic descriptive metadata can be used to index sets of items, group or otherwise associate similar items through shared metadata values, or to establish means of defining and enforcing relevance or other ranking systems. Within the context of curating research data, descriptive and other types of metadata (notably those defined the CCSDS Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System) may be more broadly applied to administer access and reuse policies, define system requirements, or perform quality assurance and control functions. However, whereas domain repositories such as the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Data Portal may capitalize on complex metadata schema such as the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) to perform an array of descriptive, technical, provenance, other repository functions, transferring data between these and more general, domain agnostic preservation systems such as university institutional repositories (IR) can result in a loss of features or services when descriptive metadata alone are crosswalked into the (typically Dublin Core) IR metadata schema. By way of exploring methods for maximizing the service and feature potential of complex metadata as harvested form a domain repository for archiving within an IR, a recent collaboration between the University of New Mexico Libraries and the Sevilleta LTER station demonstrates the application of EML at multiple stage in the data lifecycle as a means of performing quality assurance and control functions

Environmental Data Initiative/Long Term Ecological Research Network EML Congruence Checker

ESIP community members use many metadata dialects and are exposed to metadata requirements and recommendations from many organizations, disciplines, and communities. Here, we present the evaluation of metadata and data by NSF's Environmental Data Initiative data repository, for the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network and other ecosystem-level research endeavors. We focus on three questions:What is the role of the repository in evaluation in curation of data and metadata? What supporting tools and infrastructure are used by this repository? How does metadata evaluation help motivate change?This presentation was given in July 2019 at the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Summer Meeting held in Tacoma, Washington.</div

Pasta: A Network-level Architecture Design for Automating the Creation of Synthetic Products in the LTER Network

The LTER Network is now within its “Decade of Synthesis”. Providing Network-level synthetic data products, however, is still a challenge for researchers in the Network and its 26 research sites. The Network Information System group at the LTER Network Office has designed and prototyped an automated Network-level synthesis architecture called “Pasta”. The Pasta architecture extends the data warehouse notion of extraction and loading of external data into a centralized data store by building on key technology already in use at the LTER Network – primarily the Ecological Metadata Language and the Metacat database. Once loaded, the source or site data are transformed from the local site schema and into a global schema, and a new metadata document cast as EML is generated and inserted back into the Metacat database. Finally, the data that conforms to the global schema, called “synthetic ” data, are exposed to the community through a number of different interfaces, including HTML and web services. This architecture is currently being developed through a “proof-of-concept ” approach for the “Trends ” project, and has recently been demonstrated at the LTER 2006 All Scientists Meeting in Estes Park, Colorado