Workshops for a Community Roadmap for Governance of Geoscience Cyberinfrastructure (EarthCube)

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EarthCube is focused on community-driven development of an integrated and interoperable knowledge management system for data in the geo- and environmental sciences. By utilizing a cooperative, as opposed to competitive, process like that which created the Internet and Open Source software, EarthCube will attack the recalcitrant and persistent problems that so far have prevented adequate access to and the analysis, visualization, and interoperability of the vast storehouses of disparate geoscience data and data types residing in distributed and diverse data systems. This awards funds a series of broad, inclusive community interactions to gather adequate information and requirements to create a roadmap for a critical capability (governance) in the development of EarthCube, a major new NSF initiative. Community/stakeholder buy-in and adoption of standards; common tools and aproaches, if possible; best practices; cyberinfrastructure protocols; and workflows are essential to any holistic approach to creating an interoperable and service-oriented architecture that serves the needs of the geoscience research community wishing to do data-enabled science. The funded series of online/virtual workshops that will engage a brod spectrum of the geoscience community were considered innovative and exciting, especially the proposed application of social networking outreach utilities to engage early career scientists and students. A prime deliverable of the project will be a road map of how to move forward in terms of setting up broadly agreed upon structures to oversee the development of EarthCube activities in the associated working groups and concept grants. Broader impacts of the work include converging on mutually agreed upon processes to allow decision making with regard to whether or not standards or specific protocols should be established, and if so what they should be. They also include the fostering of close interaction between communities that do not commonly interact with one another (the geosciences and those in cyberinfrastructure and computer science) and focusing them on the common goal of creating a new paradigm in data and knowledge management in the geosciences.