IN010-07
Connecting earth science data to the planet’s grand challenges
Tuesday, 8 December 2020: 19:24
Virtual
Simon J D Cox, CSIRO, Land and Water, Melbourne, Australia; CSIRO, Land and Water, Clayton, Vic., Australia, Arofan Thomas Gregory, Consultant, Mont Vernon, NH, United States, Simon Hodson, International Council for Science, Committee on Data for Science and Technology - CODATA, Paris, France, Steven McEachern, Australian National University, Australian Data Archive, Canberra, Australia and Joachim Wackerow, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Mannheim, Germany
Abstract:
Earth science data is essential in addressing many of the planet’s grand challenges, particularly in natural hazards, environmental sustainability, urban resilience, agriculture, and climate change. However, integrating earth science data with data from other disciplines, particularly public health, and social, behavioral, and economic sciences, is challenging because it requires shared conceptualization, and common standards - including controlled vocabularies - for data representations. The FAIR principles provide a checklist for transparency and sharing, but are largely applied within narrow disciplinary communities.
Through its Decadal Programme, CODATA is developing guidelines for data harmonization across discipline boundaries. This covers several important aspects, including (i) dataset descriptions (metadata), (ii) vocabularies, (iii) units of measure, (iv) observable properties, (v) observation descriptions, (vi) datacubes (geophysical and social science), as well as the description of data processing and provenance. Some new types of technical specifications are also being developed in coordination with this work, notably the DDI - Cross Domain Integration model produced by the DDI Alliance.
This paper summarizes the way in which data from the earth sciences can become a significant and coordinated basis for much of today's critical research, and the efforts being made to facilitate this development.
