Environmental and earth science data are collected by a large number of projects and organizations, in both public and private sectors. The abundance of data standards, combined with weak governance around controlled vocabularies, data reuse often involves educated guesses about its structure and the meaning of embedded abbreviations and codes. The associations between published data, interpretations of data published in the literature, and samples as the underlying ground truth, are often ambiguous. This fragmentation imposes significant costs on projects.

A growing community of earth and environmental scientists, working on the interface with computational science, are developing detailed practices and standards as well as governance around identifiers, vocabularies, and software interfaces, which are necessary for wider community application. Particular interest will be paid on the integration of physical samples with their associated datasets. This session will discuss the current state of the art in environmental science data access, use and publication using modern web principles.