A workshop is proposed to identify and articulate the cyberinfrastructure (CI) needs and potential applications in the broad scientific domain encompassing sedimentary geology. The effort is intended to build consensus within the diverse sedimentary geology community (SGC) with respect to the EarthCube effort. The SGC focuses on the processes that form, shape, and affect Earth's sedimentary crust, and distribute key resources such as hydrocarbons, coal, and water. The sedimentary records studied by this community are the archives of Earth's past surface processes, climates, oceans, and biosphere. The SGC collects a great diversity of qualitative and quantitative data that characterizes diverse attributes of sedimentary rocks at spatial scales that span 13-orders of magnitude. Most data is based on physical samples; some is continuous. Derivative products based on the data are published, but the data itself are typically not archived or readily available to other researchers.
The domain workshop will focus on: 1) defining the current nature of SGC data and workflows, including the challenges and impediments to sharing and using that data; 2) establish what types of data, repositories, software, and tools (analytical, modeling, and visualization) would enable community-based, 'big science' collaborations within the SGC; 3) evaluate the potential importance of mining legacy data; 4) identify examples of the kind of scientific challenges the SGC would attack given an ideal CI; and 5) evaluate how EarthCube, if populated with the type of data and tools articulated in the above bullets, would impact the SGC's teaching. The overall product of the workshop will be a report to NSF that defines the issues and challenges that must be met for the integration of the SGC with EarthCube.
Sedimentary rocks are the most abundant rock type on the surface of the Earth and are rich in geologic data and history. The intellectual merit of the proposal is that the summary outcomes will provide SGC guidance on the priorities and use of sedimentary data to the EarthCube framework of Earth systems.
The broader of impacts of the proposed workshop are to integrate SGC with one of the most important cyberinfrastructure initiatives to NSF integrating information and data across the geosciences.
