eFAIRs: Enhancing FAIRness in seismological data management

Project Partners: GFZ, AWI, GEOMAR

The seismological community promotes since decades standardisation of formats and services as well as open data policies which are making easy data exchange an asset for this community. Thus, data is made perfectly Findable and Accessible as well as Interoperable and Reusable with enhancements expected for the latter two. The strict and technical domain specific standardisation may complicate the sharing of more exotic data within the domain itself as well as hinder interoperability throughout the earth science community. Within eFAIRs, leveraging on the know-how of the major OBS park operators and seismological data curators within the Helmholtz association, we aim at facilitating integration of special datasets from the ocean floor enhancing interoperability and reusability.

To achieve this goal, in close collaboration with AWI and Geomar, supported by IPGP, the seismological data archive of the GFZ has created special workflows for OBS data curation. In particular, with close interaction with AWI, new datasets have been archived defining a new workflow which is being translated into guidelines for the community. Domain specific software have been modified to allow OBS data inclusion with specific additional metadata. Among these metadata also persistent identifiers of the instruments in use have been included for the first time from the AWI sensor information system. Next steps are going to enlarge the portfolio of keywords and standard vocabularies in use to facilitate data discovery from scientists of different domains. Finally we plan to adopt the developed workflows for OBS data management.