Data conservancy: digital curation of the magmatic system of McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica

A paper entitled "Data Conservancy: Digital Curation of the Magmatic System of McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica" is being given by Keith Kaneda of Johns Hopkins University at the Geological Society of America Annual conference on Wednesday 3rd November 2010. I am delighted to be a joint author on this paper together with several colleagues from both Johns Hopkins and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The paper describes the curation of a data centric scientific data set that is part of a first year prototype, developed for the National Science Foundation funded DataNet program. The DataNet program is a five year initiative to generate a national infrastructure for the curation and long term preservation of scientific data. Tessella is a member of the Data Conservancy team, and I have been leading the prototype development since April of this year. We made use of a trimmed down version of the Planets data model for the prototype and wanted to test its appropriateness for a data centric archive. Amongst other things the paper describes the structure of deliverable units that was used to represent the collection contents; The McMurdo Dry Valleys collection contains rock samples, chemical analysis data, field photos, lots of scientific related metadata that has several layers of aggregation.

Here is a link to the conference session details: http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2010AM/finalprogram/abstract_178797.htm