Data Management System OLD

SIOS is focusing on Earth System Science. In order to support this effort data and products describing the relevant processes are required. These can be the result of long term monitoring efforts or ad hoc efforts focusing on process studies. SIOS does not intend to centralise all these data, but rather to establish a virtual data centre offering unified access to the relevant data.

The SIOS Data Management System (SDMS) relies on the principles of distributed data management. Datasets that are relevant for SIOS, as well as their associated metadata are managed by several physically distributed Data Centres. Each Data Centre has its own set of Data Management Facilities for ingestion of new data (and associated metadata), maintenance of the data sets (including metadata) and for data curation. The SDMS service will enable data submission, discovery, access, and use and preservation of SIOS relevant data sets and metadata across these physically distributed data centres.

The main objectives of the SDMS are to:

  • Integrate the information managed by contributing data centres in a unified catalogue through metadata harvesting.
  • Provide human and machine interfaces to the catalogue and data.
  • Ensure that all datasets generated through use of the SIOS facilities are delivered to a data repository that is connected to the SIOS data management system and through this made available to the SIOS user community
  • Develop a strategy that facilitates and promotes the utilisation of these data in research and other user communities.

More specifically SDMS will in prioritised order focus on:

  1. Data discovery - understood as the process of finding relevant datasets across the distributed data repositories contributing to SDMS.

  2. Retrieval of data - understood as the process of downloading data identified in the previous step.

  3. Visualisation of data - understood as the process of generating a graphical interpretation of a dataset (either as a map, a time series or appropriate).

  4. Transformation of data - understood as the process of reformatting, reprojecting, subsetting and combining different datasets into a new dataset.

This service is under development.

 

SIOS workshop on Data management as tool for scientists

This workshop is an one-day training session focusing on scientific data management and gives an introduction to the following concepts:

How to create a data management plan; how to document data for data sharing/publication and long term preservation; the necessity and benefits of standardised data documentation; perspectives of scientific transparency and quality control in light of structured data management; scientists as data providers and consumers, adapt or perish; data management frameworks, status and perspectives. The training session is practically oriented, focusing on existing and emerging, internal and external, forcing mechanisms on science.

The workshop was held three times during 2017 – as a module added onto three workshops funded through the Svalbard Strategic Grant by the Svalbard Science Forum/Research Council of Norway.

If you are interested in such a workshop to be held with your institution or project team, please contact our Information Officer.