The System for Earth Sample Registration's Approach to Challenges Faced when Addressing Community Needs

Abstract:

SESAR, the System for Earth Sample Registration, was developed to make geoscience samples more discoverable and accessible by supporting their unique identification, and to support the sharing, linking, and integration of sample metadata across various geoscience data systems. In recent years, the need to have consistent ways to identify and cite samples as well as the ability to access samples from different domains has grown as research crosses domains. SESAR has seen an increase in registration and adoption of the IGSN Global Sample Number from an increasingly diverse community, and has seen the need for increased accessibility of geoscience data to support multidisciplinary research and systems.

This evolution in the SESAR user community has created challenges, and, as many platforms have likely seen, led to raised expectations in the services we are able to provide. SESAR must maintain its core services (allocation of IGSN, a user dashboard for metadata management, a sample catalog, and persistent sample landing pages), while also expanding functionality to accommodate additional sample metadata for new sample types and domain specific vocabularies. For example, we need to determine where communities have the same vocabulary terms but different definitions, where they might have the same metadata field, but different controlled vocabularies, or even a lack of standard vocabularies.

Another challenge is the ability to support more complex relationships between samples and related data. These relationships may be between types of samples (a filter and the materials captured in the filter), among groups of samples (samples from the same field expedition), and relationships between samples and other resources including images, instrumentation, and facilities/organizations (the expanding variety of PIDs).

The SESAR team sees these changes as an opportunity to strengthen integration with our sister platform, EarthChem. EarthChem is developing community pages where these relationships and expanded metadata fields will support easier access to data for specific research focus areas. This presentation will demonstrate how SESAR is addressing these challenges and highlight some of the best practices we have learned in the process.