The Scientific Drilling Database (SDDB) - Data from Deep Earth Monitoring and Sounding

Introduction Projects in the International Scientific Continental Drilling Program (ICDP) produce large amounts of data. Since the start of ICDP, data sharing has played an important part in ICDP projects, and the ICDP Operational Support Group, which provides the infrastructure for data capturing for many ICDP projects, has facilitated dissemination of data within project groups. However, unless published in journal papers or books the data themselves in most cases were not available outside of the respective projects (see Conze et al. 2007, p. 32 this issue). With the online Scientific Drilling Database (SDDB; http://www.scientificdrilling.org), ICDP and GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ), Germany created a platform for the public dissemination of drilling data. Effectively publishing data requires that data are citeable and that the location of the referenced data is unique and retrievable in the long term. In the past, the internet was a problematic reference for data because URLs are short-lived; therefore, data publication on the internet needs a system of unique and persistent pointers to a citeable web publication (Lawrence et al., 2001; Klump et al., 2006). For their conventional publications many scientific publishers use Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) for web referencing. GFZ is a member of the project " Publication and Citation of Scientific and Technical Data " using DOI techniques (STD-DOI). In this project the German National Library for Science and Technology (TIB Hannover), together with GFZ, the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven, the University of Bremen, and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, set up a system to assign DOIs to data publica-Hannover is the first DOI registration agency for scientific and technical data worldwide, and GFZ Potsdam is one of its publication agents. To emphasize that the uploaded data have become citeable publications, SDDB displays bibliographical citation data with every dataset and offers an automated export of the citation data into common bibliographical database software (e.g., " Endnote " , Fig. 1). To make the exchange of data between databases easier, the database structure of SDDB is similar to the structure of the PANGAEA® database (Diepenbroek et al., 2002) and to the Drilling Information System used in ICDP projects and on IODP mission specific platform expeditions (Conze et al., 2007). Access to data in scientific databases is commonly through some kind of search interface, which may consist of a simple field for the entry of keywords or may offer more elaborate search criteria. However, …