Engaging the Sedimentary Geology Community in EarthCube (Workshop)

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A workshop is proposed to identify and articulate the cyberinfrastructure (CI) needs andpotential applications in the broad scientific domain encompassing sedimentary geology. Theeffort 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, andaffect Earth's sedimentary crust, and distribute key resources such as hydrocarbons, coal, andwater. The sedimentary records studied by this community are the archives of Earth's pastsurface processes, climates, oceans, and biosphere. The SGC collects a great diversity ofqualitative and quantitative data that characterizes diverse attributes of sedimentary rocks atspatial scales that span 13-orders of magnitude. Most data is based on physical samples; some iscontinuous. Derivative products based on the data are published, but the data itself are typicallynot 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 typesof data, repositories, software, and tools (analytical, modeling, and visualization) would enablecommunity-based, 'big science' collaborations within the SGC; 3) evaluate the potentialimportance of mining legacy data; 4) identify examples of the kind of scientific challenges theSGC would attack given an ideal CI; and 5) evaluate how EarthCube, if populated with the typeof data and tools articulated in the above bullets, would impact the SGC's teaching. The overallproduct of the workshop will be a report to NSF that defines the issues and challenges that mustbe 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 ingeologic data and history. The intellectual merit of the proposal is that the summary outcomeswill provide SGC guidance on the priorities and use of sedimentary data to the EarthCubeframework of Earth systems.The broader of impacts of the proposed workshop are to integrate SGC with one of the mostimportant cyberinfrastructure initiatives to NSF integrating information and data across thegeosciences.