EAGER: In-situ archiving of digital scientific data

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

The science community has increasingly employed multi-method approaches to scientific exploration with an increasing reliance on computational methods. This is particularly the case with the science of climate and global environmental change. With this evolution has come the fundamental importance of data storage and archiving. There is an open problem in archiving digital science data that affects many fundamental science initiatives. We propose an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) (2009) compliant data archival repository that lives early in the scientific research pipeline, supporting the ingest and access mechanisms that users have become accustomed to and have staff to support, while simultaneously providing support for curation and preservation of data, and making relational database, and eventually other databases, more usable in real time by researchers and policy makers. The testbed for this approach is the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) database, the most complete data archive of how communities develop strategies for sustainable forest management. The IFRI scientific user community consists of field visits every five years to over 250 diverse sites in 11 countries. The proposed repository conceptually wraps the original database into a unit that also contains a metadata catalog and provenance collection tool with interaction and replication guided by the OAIS standard. A fundamental research question in this effort is the data model that maps a database schema to an object model which abstracts scientific intent. The abstraction of scientific intent is grounded in a general conceptual model for reasoning about the life cycle of social-ecological systems and their interactions and outcomes. We thus expect to generalize the tools and data model that provide the map from a database to the science-oriented conceptual model expressed as an ontology. The International Forestry Resources and Institutions network includes twelve Collaborating Research Centers in ten countries on four continents. The early research conducted in this project will form a foundation for outreach through IFRI that could have broad potential for science and policy impacts worldwide. The proposal funds a computer science graduate student and postdoctoral fellow who will be engaged in interdisciplinary research in an area of emerging importance in the next many generations. A critical component of the long term success of the ideas of this proposal will be by getting word out. Therefore we will seek to present talks about these tools and approach long-term digital data collection projects, particularly ones focused on environmental monitoring such as LTER and OOI.