Paleoclimate Data Standards
Background
Modern life would simply be unlivable without standards. You only have to travel to a country that uses a different electric plug shape than yours to understand this.
A key objective of LinkedEarth is to promote the development of a community standard for paleoclimate data and metadata.
Process
The work done on LiPD, which closely mirrors our ontology, provides a stepping stone for this effort. Building on this, the 2016 workshop on paleoclimate data standards served as a stepping stone to initiate a broader process of community engagement and feedback elicitation to generate a community-vetted standard. The workshop identified the necessity to distinguish a set of essential, recommended and desired properties for each dataset. A consensus emerged that these levels are archive-specific, as what is needed to intelligently re-use a marine-annually resolved record could be quite different than what is needed to intelligently re-use an ice core record, for instance. It was decided that archive-centric working groups (WGs; self-assembled coalitions of knowledgeable experts) would be best positioned to elaborate and discuss the components of a data standard for their specific sub-field of paleoclimatology. It is also critical to ensure interoperability between standards to enable longitudinal (multiproxy) investigations.
This process contributes to the data stewardship initiative of our PAGES/Future Earth partners. Therefore, we are working together with PAGES to reach out to the broadest cross-section of paleoscientists and invite them to contribute to the process. The end goal is a standard to be precisely documented and adopted by LinkedEarth and PAGES. The standard will be implemented in all LinkedEarth activities and proposed for adoption to EarthCube, the Research Data Alliance, the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners, NOAA WDS-Paleo and Pangaea.
Publications
A scholarly product will be a peer-reviewed publication presenting the standard and detailing the decisions that led to it. Pursuant to PAGES policies, authorship will be extremely inclusive and acknowledge all scientific input into the process.
