EarthCube is a joint venture between the Directorate of Geosciences and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation. It is a community-driven effort to design and implement an effective data and knowledge management system for the geosciences that will integrates disparate data sets and web services and serves all members of the geoscience community.
This award is for a workshop to be convened in Winter 2013, organized around a scientific domain (theme) called ?Paleogeoscience?. The defining characteristics of this broad domain are 1) its focus on past earth system processes and 2) that all scientific inferences in this domain are ultimately based on the collection of physical samples in the field, from which many kinds of geochemical, geobiological, and geophysical measurements are extracted. This domain includes scientists working on paleorecords from: cores drilled in the seafloor, lakebeds, peatlands, continental crust, glaciers or ice sheets, or trees; rock samples hammered from outcrops; fossil remains retrieved from various depositional environments; speleothems; and corals.
Participants will consist of key individuals already working on EarthCube activities, as well as those from this newly formed special interest group. Special efforts will be made to reach out to all members of this diverse community in order to gather as much information about user requirements and other aspects of EarthCube relevant to the ?long tail? of data.
Broader impacts involve the potential to change dramatically the way paleogeoscientists interact with data, whether through discovery of existing data, providing context for new data, characterizing and comparing disparate datasets, or archiving data, in ways that will enable new questions to be answered and existing challenges to be addressed. The impact will likely be at least as great, and possibly greater, for students at the graduate, undergraduate, and even secondary levels (and their teachers), as the simplification of data discovery, visualization, and comparison will allow people with less training to interact with paleogeoscience data in a meaningful way. These tools will facilitate the communication of scientific findings even to policymakers and the public at large.
