ESSI3.9

Public information:

Significant investments are made globally to study samples from the Earth, the Moon, and other planetary materials in research laboratories to extract new scientific insights about the history and state of our solar system. Expensive laboratory infrastructure and advanced instrumentation generates data at an ever increasing level of precision, resolution, and volume. This data needs to be efficiently managed and losslessly transferred from instruments in the lab, where the data are not accessible to others, to a “Collaboration” domain, where researchers can share and jointly analyze these data, to the “Public” domain, complete with all relevant information about the analytical process and uncertainty, and cross-references to originating samples and publications. Many solutions today are bespoke and inefficient, lacking, for example, unique identification of samples, instruments, and data sets needed to trace the analytical history of the data.

This session provides an overview on all facets of geochemical data management since the first “Editors Roundtable” in 2007, an initial meeting of editors, publishers, and database providers to implement consistent practices for reporting geochemical data in the literature or sharing these data in geochemical databases. What has happened since? Our presentations stretch from initiatives describing the full workflow support, to individual tools for data management in the lab, to specific data collections and data publication initiatives to the overarching aim of linking between systems and the need for standards.