EarthCube GEO Domain Workshop: Cyberinfrastructure for Paleogeoscience

EarthCube是地球科学局和国家科学基金会网络基础设施办公室之间的合资企业。这是一项社区驱动的努力，旨在设计和实施一个有效的地球科学数据和知识管理系统，该系统将整合不同的数据集和网络服务，并为地球科学界的所有成员提供服务。该奖项是为2013年冬季召开的研讨会，围绕一个科学领域（主题）组织，称为？古地质科学？这一广泛领域的定义特征是：1）它关注过去的地球系统过程; 2）这一领域的所有科学推断最终都基于野外收集的物理样品，从中提取多种地球化学，地球生物学和地球物理测量。该领域包括从事古记录研究的科学家，这些古记录来自：在海底、湖床、泥炭地、大陆地壳、冰川或冰盖或树木中钻取的岩心;从露头中锤取的岩石样本;从各种沉积环境中提取的化石遗骸;洞穴沉积物;珊瑚。参与者将包括已经从事EarthCube活动的关键人员，以及来自这个新成立的特别兴趣小组的人员。 将作出特别努力，以达到这个多元化的社区的所有成员，以收集尽可能多的信息，用户的要求和其他方面的地球立方有关的？长尾？更广泛的影响涉及到有可能极大地改变古地球科学家与数据互动的方式，无论是通过发现现有数据，为新数据提供背景，描述和比较不同的数据集，还是将数据存档，从而能够回答新的问题并应对现有的挑战。对于研究生、本科生甚至中学的学生（以及他们的老师）来说，这种影响可能至少一样大，甚至可能更大，因为数据发现、可视化和比较的简化将使受过较少培训的人能够以有意义的方式与古地球科学数据进行交互。这些工具将有助于向决策者和广大公众传播科学发现。

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.