Integration of bio- and geoscience data with the ODM2 standards and software ecosystem for the CZOData and BiG CZ Data projects

Abstract:

We have developed a family of solutions to the challenges of integrating diverse data from of biological and geological (BiG) disciplines for Critical Zone (CZ) science. These standards and software solutions have been developed around the new Observations Data Model version 2.0 (ODM2, http://ODM2.org), which was designed as a profile of the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) Observations and Measurements (O&M) standard. The ODM2 standards and software ecosystem has at it’s core an information model that balances specificity with flexibility to powerfully and equally serve the needs of multiple dataset types, from multivariate sensor-generated time series to geochemical measurements of specimen hierarchies to multi-dimensional spectral data to biodiversity observations. ODM2 has been adopted as the information model guiding the next generation of cyberinfrastructure development for the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (http://www.iedadata.org/) and the CUAHSI Water Data Center (https://www.cuahsi.org/wdc).

Here we present several components of the ODM2 standards and software ecosystem that were developed specifically to help CZ scientists and their data managers to share and manage data through the national Critical Zone Observatory data integration project (CZOData, http://criticalzone.org/national/data/) and the bio integration with geo for critical zone science data project (BiG CZ Data, http://bigcz.org/). These include the ODM2 Controlled Vocabulary system (http://vocabulary.odm2.org), the YAML Observation Data Archive & exchange (YODA) File Format (https://github.com/ODM2/YODA-File) and the BiG CZ Toolbox, which will combine easy-to-install ODM2 databases (https://github.com/ODM2/ODM2) with a variety of graphical software packages for data management such as ODMTools (https://github.com/ODM2/ODMToolsPython) and the ODM2 Streaming Data Loader (https://github.com/ODM2/ODM2StreamingDataLoader).