CINERGI: Community INventory of Earthcube Resources for Geoscience Interoperability

Abstract: 

The central goal of CINERGI, an EarthCube Building Block project, is to create methodology for resource discovery and to compile a large inventory of high-quality information resources spanning a wide range of geoscience domains. By assembling this registry, the CINERGI project fulfills a key need that was articulated by geoscientists during EarthCube domain end-user workshops. Constructing and curating a comprehensive resource inventory requires integration of metadata records from standards-compliant catalogs maintained by domain data facilities and large projects, and information about data sources that are used and/or generated by multitude of smaller research projects, typically referred to as the “long tail of science”. The poster will focus on CINERGI metadata processing pipeline, a key component of the project. The pipeline manages harvesting metadata documents from distributed catalogs, loading them into a staging database, validating them against content standards, and then processing the documents to improve metadata content before republishing metadata documents via a standard interface. Metadata enhancements include checking and validating spatial extent, assigning an extent based on available information if applicable; analyzing and adding keywords based on CINERGI ontology that spans multiple geoscience domains, to make the metadata easier to discover across disciplines; validating organization names against standard vocabularies; and adding standard thematic category and resource type classification terms. As the metadata enhancers change the content of the record, a corresponding provenance record is being created and made accessible via CINERGI search interface. The poster will describe approach and technical details of the project, provide a status update, and discuss the use of project outcomes in several research scenarios.

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