Implementing a Community-Driven Cyberinfrastructure Platform for the Paleo- and Rock Magnetic Scientific Fields that Generalizes to Other Geoscience Disciplines

EarthRef.org is a geoscience umbrella website for several databases and data and model repository portals. These portals, unified in the mandate to preserve their respective data and promote scientific collaboration in their fields, are also disparate in their schemata. The Magnetics Information Consortium (http://earthref.org/MagIC/) is a grass-roots cyberinfrastructure effort envisioned by the paleo- and rock magnetic scientific community to archive their wealth of peer-reviewed raw data and interpretations from studies on natural and synthetic samples and relies on a partially strict subsumptive hierarchical data model. The Geochemical Earth Reference Model (http://earthref.org/GERM/) portal focuses on the chemical characterization of the Earth and relies on two data schemata: a repository of peer-reviewed reservoir geochemistry, and a database of partition coefficients for rocks, minerals, and elements. The Seamount Biogeosciences Network (http://earthref.org/SBN/) encourages the collaboration between the diverse disciplines involved in seamount research and includes the Seamount Catalog (http://earthref.org/SC/) of bathymetry and morphology. All of these portals also depend on the EarthRef Reference Database (http://earthref.org/ERR/) for publication reference metadata and the EarthRef Digital Archive (http://earthref.org/ERDA/), a generic repository of data objects and their metadata. The development of the new MagIC Search Interface (http://earthref.org/MagIC/search/) centers on a reusable platform designed to be flexible enough for largely heterogeneous datasets and to scale up to datasets with tens of millions of records. The HTML5 web application and Oracle 11g database residing at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) support the online contribution and editing of complex datasets in a spreadsheet environment and the browsing and filtering of these contributions in the context of thousands of other datasets. EarthRef.org is in the process of implementing this platform across all of its data portals in spite of the wide variety of data schemata and is dedicated to serving the geoscience community with as little effort from the end-users as possible.