Linking Us Together: the GeoScience Knowledge Network

This poster will be presented as an interactive experience, inviting you to identify your data resource (project, lab, repository, archive, etc.) and place yourself and your group ‘on the map’ and contribute your knowledge to an expanding effort to build bridges between existing communities of practice.

Many groups have been managing, curating and archiving data for their respective communities for a long time.  But it is no longer enough to focus on our local communities defined by research domain, funding source, project group, etc.  ESIP has made significant progress identifying and breaking down barriers within the U.S., to bring together geoscience communities of practice. The NSF EarthCube initiative aims to create integrated data management infrastructures across the geosciences by funding research efforts to complement, extend, enhance and connect existing infrastructure components.  On a global scale, the Research Data Alliance, supported by the European Commission, the National Science Foundation and other U.S. agencies, and the Australian Government, is constructing the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data across technologies and between disciplines and nations with the ultimate goal of addressing the grand challenges of society.  The Belmont Forum, established in 2009, brings together environmental and geoscience funding agencies from 14 nations and seeks to build a coalition of national resources to advance global environmental change research.  Future Earth, with funding coordinated through the Belmont Forum, will be the platform through which many global change research programs will be coordinated, and the broad research themes, including the Earth Sciences, will require advanced information architectures to enable trans-disciplinary data-information-knowledge transfer.  Because the need to address global environmental research challenges requires a more coordinated and collaborative international approach to building next-generation e-infrastructures, the Belmont Forum has initiated the multi-phased E-Infrastructures and Data Management Collaborative Research Action (CRA).  One of the workgroups, the focus of which is “harmonizing global data infrastructures for sharing environmental data”, is generating an inventory of existing e-infrastructure nodes, specifically “existing domain-specific integration platforms”, and many ESIP participants should be included in such an inventory.  

The poster will be completed during the meeting as participants add their organization and information and indicate bridges to other organizations.  Come see how quickly we exceed the 3’ by 4’ poster size limits and move into a third dimension!