Earthcube IA: Collaborative Proposal: Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance as a Model for Integrating Earthcube Technology Resources and Engaging the Broad Community

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A fundamental requirement for EarthCube is access to a comprehensive spectrum of well-curated, reliably re-usable, and seamlessly interoperable scientific data, but this does not exist today with many Geoscience domains still lacking sustainable data services. This project is a collaboration between an established data facility in the solid Earth sciences, IEDA (Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance), three scientifically related data communities in the solid Earth sciences that lack data facilities (deep seafloor processes, mineral physics, polar cryosphere), a research data collection (MetPetDB), a group of computer scientists that specialize in distributed information systems and interoperability, and a social scientist to re-structure the IEDA data facility, both organizationally and architecturally, to create the pilot of a multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary alliance of data providers. The goal is to create a model for other data facilities to partner with so far ?underserved? data communities to broaden integration of Geoscience domains into EarthCube, and advance both interdisciplinary and discipline-specific data science, while realizing economies of scale by sharing common data services. Using IEDA as a testbed, the project will adopt elements of three EarthCube technologies that have been or are being developed by EarthCube Building Block projects: CINERGI (Community INventory of EarthCube Resources for Geoscience Interoperability), GeoWS (Geoscience Web Services), and GeoLink (Semantic Web technology), to build the architecture of the alliance, thereby testing, validating, and potentially improving these technologies. The technical work will focus on creating a flexible and scalable framework that will allow a growing number of partner systems to plug into shared capabilities such as applications for integrated data discovery and data submission and contribute their resources. Architectural changes at IEDA will go hand-in-hand with the transition of IEDA?s organizational structure toward the envisioned multi-institutional alliance.