EarthCube Building Blocks: Community Inventory of EarthCube Resources for Geoscience Interoperability (CINERGI)

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

EarthCube Building Blocks: Community Inventory of EarthCube Resources for Geoscience Interoperability (CINERGI) Collaborating Institutions: University of California San Diego, Arizona Geological Survey, University of Chicago, Columbia University, The Open Geospatial Consortium This building block project focuses on constructing a community inventory and knowledgebase on geoscience information resources to extend work on interoperability-readiness and meet the challenge of finding resources across disciplines, assessing their fitness for use in specific research scenarios, and providing tools for integrating and re-using data from multiple domains. This capability is a key EarthCube mission mentioned in reports of several EarthCube domain workshops and roadmaps. We envision a comprehensive system linking geoscience resources, users, publications, usage information, and cyberinfrastructure (CI) components. It will supplement information included in existing data discovery catalogs by integrating feedback from users on their experience with resources, by providing characterization of resources in an interoperability assessment framework, and by supporting registration of mappings between information models and vocabularies to assist data integration. To assess interoperability among components an open source validation mechanism will be implemented. The system will enable community input and access by geoscientists via online user interfaces, and will provide documented web service APIs so that inventory information can be easily browsed, analyzed, and integrated within the emerging EarthCube CI. The project team will collaborate with related EarthCube efforts, including Building Blocks, RCNs, domain workshop and the Test Enterprise Governance. The PIs will work with researchers from selected geoscience domains (stratigraphy, hydrology, critical zone science) to validate and demonstrate advanced features of CINERGI in specific research context. CINERGI is a direct response to the communitys need for easy discovery, assessment, and utilization of CI resources, expressed by many EarthCube stakeholders. It is a fundamental building block of an Earth Science CI and will serve geoscientists across all domains to efficiently and in more informed manner use existing and emerging resources for productive and transformative research. It will also help CI experts and computer scientists to align new developments better with existing resources such as vocabularies, ontologies, data exchange protocols, or metadata schemas.