Collaborative Research: Open Core Data: Transformative Data Infrastructure for Integrating and Accessing Scientific Drilling and Coring Data

Scientific drilling and coring is crucial for the advancement of the Earth Sciences. Vast

resources have been invested in drilling and coring operations around the world: on land,

in the oceans, and in the polar regions. The return of these investments must be maximized

by ensuring optimal access and re-usability of the data generated through drilling and coring

projects.

This project, Open Core Data (OCD), is a next-generation approach to data management that will

open vast stores of existing and future geoscience data to new and innovative scientific use by

radically improving discoverability, accessibility, citability, preservation, and integration

of data from past, current, and future drilling and coring projects.

Research objectives of the International Ocean Discovery Program and Continental

Scientific Drilling communities provide impressive examples of the breadth of scientific

themes that drilling and coring helps address, ranging from the nature of the deep biosphere

and oceanic sub-seafloor, to understanding environmental change, species evolution, fault

zone dynamics, magmatism, and tectonics, among many others. The scientific potential enabled

by OCD is therefore large and expected to impact many geoscience domains. OCD will form the

nucleus of a federated data infrastructure that will support entirely new scientific approaches

and lines of inquiry by facilitating integration of continental and marine data for synthesis

studies.

OCD will align with NSF data policies to provide open access to all scientific drilling data.

Both research and the process of transferring data to archives for permanent curation will

be simplified and streamlined through this effort. Open Core Data will structure and integrate

scientific drilling data optimally to enable data-driven science that faces substantial barriers

at present related to data heterogeneity in discovery, access, and formats. Open Core Data

will enable geoscience domains that utilize scientific drilling and coring in their workflows

to come closer to realizing the full potential of their data, and to make their own unique

new contributions that benefit science and society as new research is enabled.