THE Interoperability Challenge for the Geosciences: Stepping up from Interoperability between Disciplinary Siloes to Creating Transdisciplinary Data Platforms.

Abstract:

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at the Australian National University (ANU) has collocated over 10 PB of national and international data assets within a HPC facility to create the National Environmental Research Data Interoperability Platform (NERDIP). The data span a wide range of fields from the earth systems and environment (climate, coasts, oceans, and geophysics) through to astronomy, bioinformatics, and the social sciences. These diverse data collections are collocated on a major data storage node that is linked to a Petascale HPC and Cloud facility. Users can search across all of the collections and either log in and access the data directly, or they can access the data via standards-based web services.

These collocated petascale data collections are theoretically a massive resource for interdisciplinary science at scales and resolutions never hitherto possible. But once collocated, multiple barriers became apparent that make cross-domain data integration very difficult and often so time consuming, that either less ambitious research goals are attempted or the project is abandoned. Incompatible content is only one half of the problem: other showstoppers are differing access models, licences and issues of ownership of derived products.

Brokers can enable interdisciplinary research but in reality are we just delaying the inevitable?

A call to action is required adopt a transdiciplinary approach at the conception of development of new multi-disciplinary systems whereby those across all the scientific domains, the humanities, social sciences and beyond work together to create a unity of informatics plaforms that interoperate horizontally across the multiple discipline boundaries, and also operate vertically to enable a diversity of people to access data from high end researchers, to undergraduate, school students and the general public. Once we master such a transdisciplinary approach to our vast global information assets, we will then achieve THE interoperability challenge for the geosciences and made geoscience data and information accessible to all domains and to all peoples.