Earth and environmental 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, impedes data reuse because it often involves educated guesses about its structure and the meaning of embedded abbreviations and codes. The connections 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 and impedes sharing and re-use.
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 persistent identifiers, controlled vocabularies, and software interfaces, which are necessary for wider community application. This session invites contributions that explore, explain and extend the current state of the art in Earth and environmental science data access, use and publication using modern web principles. Particular interest will be paid to the integration of physical samples with their associated datasets and scholarly literature.