Collaborative Proposal: Web-based Geo-Visualization and Laboratory Integration with the Magnetics Information Consortium

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This award continues support for the Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC). The goal of MagIC is to develop and maintain an open community digital data archive for published rock and paleomagnetic data. This will allow researchers and other users continued free access to archive, search, visualize, manipulate and download these data, thereby improving research capabilities and ensuring ongoing access to previously collected data in the Earth Sciences. Since 2003, MagIC`s development has been funded by NSF as a domain-specific enterprise, and has recently transitioned to a modern system that will allow development of improved capacity to link to other data collections necessary to harness data addressing significant long term research problems in paleomagnetic and rock magnetic research. These include (i) understanding of past climate changes and their relation to the Earth`s magnetic field; (ii) the timing of the appearance and growth of the Earth`s solid inner core and the associated influences on the geomagnetic field; (iii) the geodynamics of the Earth`s mantle, where magnetic data are crucial in determining the fixity of mantle plumes and the possibility of true polar wander, (iv) biogeomagnetism, and (v) magnetism at high pressures and in extra-terrestrial bodies, including other planets. MagIC provides fundamental tools online for data interpretation and geo-visualization. Training of the next generation in the development and use of modern data analysis methods is a key component of this initiative. A major overhaul of MagIC`s architecture has been undertaken, including transitioning to the open source GitHub repository so that community input can drive software development. The database backend (using MongoDB and Elasticsearch) and web interface (using Meteor with React and Semantic UI) have been completely rewritten and the underlying data model (now version 3.0) has been drastically simplified. Flexible procedures for archiving data via web interfaces have been developed to improve the user experience and address the needs of the paleomagnetic and rock magnetic community. This has been a drastic effort, but the new architecture is ready for expanded business. Modern scientific efforts require efficient access to data, transparency in data processing, and reliable documentation so that questions of reproducibility and standardization can be readily addressed. A key aspect of our past and future work is the establishment of individualized workflow schemas for understanding all aspects of any study from field metadata, through lab measurements, and interpreted results. This facilitates integration of data from disparate studies, and gives full control to the data user in determining data quality and suitability for specific purposes. It is also rapidly developing into a requirement for geoscience publications. Work under this proposal will focus on five areas: (i) assisting paleomagnetic labs in development and implementation of transparent workflow strategies to archive their data; (ii) adding new search, visualization, and API features to MagIC; (iii) interoperability with other magnetics databases; (iv) additions to PmagPy data processing tools, including reproducibility via the use of Jupyter notebooks; (v) making make other data sources, such as IODP, accessible in MagIC; (vi) data rescue operations to ensure that valuable existing information is not lost to future researchers.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.