EarthCube RoadMap: CROSS-DOMAIN INTEROPERABILITY

The rationale for cross-domain interoperability is to facilitate more accurate modeling and understanding of the Earth System, which requires integration of information about the solid earth, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and interactions between these domains. Interdisciplinary research requires utilization of datasets that have been collected and compiled by various researchers at different times and places. Often data are applied to analyses different from those for which they were originally collected. Enabling sound scientific application of such cross-domain datasets requires that they are well documented, that they can be found, and that the information contained in them can be transformed into a form that can be used. Fostering cross-domain interoperability thus requires support for dataset documentation and curation from the beginning of its life cycle; development of discovery mechanisms that operate in a federated system of catalogs with different domain contexts; tools to support data exploration and manipulation to extract the desired information; a social framework for cross-domain networking between researchers needing to understand each other’s data; and a governance system to provide direction, decision-making, and authority for prioritizing and developing the necessary specifications and tools. In this document we present a roadmap for developing these capabilities in the context of the larger EarthCube framework.EarthCube roadmap prepared 2011-2012, apparently no longer available from EarthCube repositories