Developing Practice-informed, Minimal Overhead Workflows for Large-scale Geoscience Data Management

The geoscience community has introduced several initiatives to support sharing of local and Web data (e.g., Arko et al., 2015; Frew & Bose, 2001; Mickle et al., 2014; Narock et al., 2014), recognizing that their analyses increasingly rely on the availability, quality, and interoperability of high volumes of data. Many of these initiatives expect users to place data in open repositories or modify it for enhanced sharing, often requiring them to change their existing practices. While these innovations may simplify researchers' workflows, scientists and practitioners alike face severe time and institutional constraints and have little training or incentive to change their practices, resulting in actual and perceived overhead as well as limited adoption (Miller & Bowker, 2009). Prior research has encouraged the alignment of data sharing infrastructures with researchers' existing practices (Zimmerman 2007) and needs (Borgman 2016).

We are investigating mechanisms for integrating data management and sharing within users' existing workflows. As a first step to developing such practice-aligned cyberinfrastructure, we report findings from semi-structured interviews with geoscience faculty, students, and professionals about their daily interactions with data. From these interviews, we construct a portrait of geoscience research data management and infrastructures. By comparing our participants' data infrastructure needs with their current systems' capabilities and by referencing prior literature we suggest ways to better match infrastructure capabilities with our participants' needs. These findings may be used to improve alignment between existing cyberinfrastructure and geoscientists' behavioral norms thus reducing user burden, facilitating data management and sharing, and increasing tool adoption.