Scalable models of data sharing in Earth sciences

Many Earth science disciplines are currently experiencing the emergence of new ways of data publication and the establishment of an information technology infrastructure for data archiving and exchange. Building on efforts to standardize data and metadata publication in geochemistry [Staudigel et al., 2002], here we discuss options for data publication, archiving and exchange. All of these options have to be structured to meet some minimum requirements of scholarly publication, in particular reliability of archival, reproducibility and falsifiability. All data publication and archival methods should strive to produce databases that are fully interoperable and this requires an appropriate data and metadata interchange protocol. To accomplish the latter we propose a new Metadata Interchange Format (.mif) that can be used for more effective sharing of data and metadata across digital libraries, data archives, and research projects. This is not a proposal for a particular set of metadata parameters but rather of a methodology that will enable metadata parameter sets to be easily developed and interchanged between research organizations. Examples are provided for geochemical data as well as map images to illustrate the flexibility of the approach.