EarthCube IA: Collaborative Proposal: LinkedEarth: Crowdsourcing Data Curation & Standards Development in Paleoclimatology

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Natural climate variability signficantly modulates anthropogenic global warming, and only paleoclimate observations can adequately constrain it. Moreover, such observations are most powerful when many records are brought together to provide a spatial understanding of past variability. However, there is currently no universal way to share paleoclimate data between users or machines, hindering integration and synthesis. Large-scale, international, paleoclimate data syntheses have a long and successful history, but have been needlessly labor-intensive. Recognizing that (1) paleoclimate data curation requires expert knowledge; (2) top-down data management approaches are ineffectual; (3) existing infrastructure does not foster standardization; there emerges a critical need for a flexible platform enabling crowdsourced data curation and standards development.The platform will be combined with editorial and community-driven processes which will result in a system that has the potential to engage a broad user base in geoscientific data curation. The proposed framework will lower barriers to participation in the geosciences, enabling more "dark data" to join the public domain using community-sanctioned protocols. The pilot project will facilitate the work of hundreds of paleoclimate scientists, accelerating scientific discovery and the dissemination of its results to society.Semantic wikis provide a simple, intuitive interface to semantic languages and infrastructure that build on open Web architecture. Like traditional wikis, they enable the collaborative authoring of content. Secure access and time-stamped content also enable the tracking of changes and the accountability of users, as well as moderation capabilities by community members of recognized expertise. In contrast to traditional wikis, semantic wikis allow contributors to assign meaning to their content, specifying relationships between the objects they describe. This enables artificial intelligence reasoners to parse, process and translate these data into more useful forms. The technology is well-proven, scalable, and completely transparent to the user, requiring no computer science knowledge or more sophisticated technology than a web browser. The LinkedEarth Wiki will automatically translate this information into Linked Open Data, a universal format to share data across the Web. To demonstrate this concept?s broad applicability across paleoclimate science, the project?s target community is the PAGES2k consortium, an international collaboration dedicated to the climate of the Common Era. Social technologies will be developed to power collective curation, standards development and quality control by the community itself. The project will demonstrate applicability to other paleogeosciences, serving as a potential template for other geoscientific disciplines.