Making the MagIC (Magnetics Information Consortium) Web Application Accessible to New Users and Useful to Experts
Abstract
Challenges are faced by both new and experienced users interested in contributing their data to community repositories, in data discovery, or engaged in potentially transformative science. The Magnetics Information Consortium (https://earthref.org/MagIC) has recently simplified its data model and developed a new containerized web application to reduce the friction in contributing, exploring, and combining valuable and complex datasets for the paleo-, geo-, and rock magnetic scientific community. The new data model more closely reflects the hierarchical workflow in paleomagnetic experiments to enable adequate annotation of scientific results and ensure reproducibility. The new open-source (https://github.com/earthref/MagIC) application includes an upload tool that is integrated with the data model to provide early data validation feedback and ease the friction of contributing and updating datasets. The search interface provides a powerful full text search of contributions indexed by ElasticSearch and a wide array of filters, including specific geographic and geological timescale filtering, to support both novice users exploring the database and experts interested in compiling new datasets with specific criteria across thousands of studies and millions of measurements. The datasets are not large, but they are complex, with many results from evolving experimental and analytical approaches. These data are also extremely valuable due to the cost in collecting or creating physical samples and the, often, destructive nature of the experiments. MagIC is heavily invested in encouraging young scientists as well as established labs to cultivate workflows that facilitate contributing their data in a consistent format. This eLightning presentation includes a live demonstration of the MagIC web application, developed as a configurable container hosting an isomorphic Meteor JavaScript application, MongoDB database, and ElasticSearch search engine. Visitors can explore the MagIC Database through maps and image or plot galleries or search and filter the raw measurements and their derived hierarchy of analytical interpretations.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFMIN11D..07M
- Keywords:
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- 1916 Data and information discovery;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1918 Decision analysis;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1960 Portals and user interfaces;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1976 Software tools and services;
- INFORMATICS