Browsing by Author "Rawling, Tim"

As geochemical data enable understanding of the Earth system and help to address critical societal issues the organisation thereof is important. Questions asked about processes affecting our environment and geological past become more complex and interdisciplinary in nature as well as multidimensional. To help answer these questions within the geochemistry research capabilities and data compilations are required to be comprehensive and both human and machine readable. Various international organisations are building infrastructure to capture and distribute geochemical data in a consistent manner adhering to the FAIR principles. Since May 2021 the OneGeochemistry initiative has officially started efforts towards aligning these organisations’ data frameworks in order to standardise how geochemical data is reported around the globe. In November 2022 the OneGeochemistry initiative applied and was granted to become the OneGeochemistry CODATA Working Group as part of the International Science Councils Committee on Data. The initiative has now also been endorsed by the Geochemical Society, the European Association of Geochemistry and the Working Group has been endorsed by the IUGS Commission on Global Geochemical Baselines. Coordination of the OneGeochemistry initiative is funded through the WorldFAIR project where it is one of the work packages in the larger ‘WorldFAIR: Global cooperation on FAIR data policy and practice’ project. A FAIR Implementation Profile analyses of the geochemistry communities of Australia (AusGeochem), USA (EarthChem, AstroMat) and Europe (GEOROC-DIGIS, EPOS-MSL, NFDI4EARTH) resulted in recognition of the need for common vocabularies for geochemistry data reporting as one of the most important actions to undertake towards international geochemistry data interoperability. A task adopted by EarthChem-DIGIS(GEOROC)-GFZ(DataSystems) collaboration and Research Vocabularies Australia. Here we will present an overview of the current OneGeochemistry initiative and its preliminary outcomes with regards to FAIR Implementation Profiles and processes that will help enable geochemical data interoperability between various stakeholders.

‘WorldFAIR: Global cooperation on FAIR data policy and practice’ is a European Commission funded project composed of 11 discipline and cross-discipline case studies drawn together by CODATA, the Committee on DATA of the International Science Councils Committee on DATA, and is supported by the Research Data Alliance. WorldFAIR is a diverse, global community effort that currently has 19 partners located in Africa, Australasia, Europe, and North and South America, representing organisations from research, government and industry. The 11 individual case studies are drawn from Chemistry, Nanomaterials, Geochemistry, Social Surveys, Population Health, Urban Health, Biodiversity, Agriculture, Oceans, Disaster Risk Reduction and Cultural Heritage. The WorldFAIR project aims to focus on the interoperability and reusability of research data products from both within and across disciplines by creating a Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF). The foundation of the CDIF will be a series of FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIPs) which will be used as a methodology for individual communities to express their FAIR practices and decisions for each of the 15 individual FAIR guiding principles. As an example of how this will work, the WorldFAIR’s Geochemistry case study is led by OneGeochemistry, an international network of national geochemical data infrastructure organisations. Initially an informal network with representatives from AuScope (Australia), GEOROC (Germany), EPOS Multi-scale Laboratories (Europe), EarthChem (US) and AstroMaterials (US). With the advent of WorldFAIR, OneGeochemistry has formalised it’s governance structure and is now a CODATA Work Group. Over the life of WorldFAIR, OneGeochemistry will work towards developing a community prototype FAIR Implementation Profile(s) for individual geochemical techniques, including the minimum defined variables, through workshops and consultations, and subsequently be responsible for their communication, publication and dissemination. The Geochemistry case study will work closely with the Chemistry case study and leverage relevant chemical standards and vocabularies wherever possible. Through the development of community lead FAIR Implementation Profile(s) for geochemistry within a global Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF), WorldFAIR and OneGeochemistry are both advancing the adoption of the FAIR data principles within Geochemistry and simultaneously enabling interoperability of geochemical research data products across the other ten discipline case studies.

WorldFAIR Milestone 6, reported here, specifies work done and being undertaken for Deliverable 5.2 (due month 20), ‘Geochemistry Methodology and Outreach’, which has the following description: “This deliverable will outline the methodology used to develop and update FIPs and promulgate knowledge of them, including publishers to ensure the quality, interoperability and reusability of data in publications”. As geochemical data is collected on a diversity of natural and synthetic samples (rocks, sediments, minerals, fossils, meteorites, cosmic dust, fluids, gases, etc), from the Earth or other planetary bodies, there is an incredible range of analytical instruments used and hundreds of analytical techniques applied. This results in a community with many subdisciplines that produce typically ‘long tail’ data - data that are highly specific and small in volume. The community and the data produced are heterogeneous and overlaps of common minimum variables are scarce. We conclude that developing a single FAIR Implementation Profile (FIP) for all geochemical data will not be possible; rather, there will need to be multiple linked FIPs for geochemistry subdisciplines and at multiple levels of granularity. As a FIP is underpinned by FAIR Enabling Resources (FERs), many such FERs need to be publicly available or need to be published. By specifying any FER(s) that accompany each FAIR principle within the individual FIP, users of any geochemical dataset/database will have accurate documentation for each FAIR Principles, and thus enhance machine readability. This Milestone describes progress towards developing a methodology designed to assist in defining the individual FERs required to fully describe the minimum scientific and technical variables used to describe any geochemical analysis. These FERs will enable the generation of multiple FIPs, facilitating published results to be reproduced and shared globally with sufficient metadata to make any geochemical resource FAIR for both humans and machines. This Milestone report then discusses how the components of this methodology are being executed in the community, discusses resulting progress towards minimum common variables of samples, discusses how to make best practices for geochemical methods available online and specifies a set of vocabularies published to describe methodologies. Visit WorldFAIR online at http://worldfair-project.eu. WorldFAIR is funded by the EC HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-41 Coordination and Support Action under Grant Agreement No. 101058393.