Enhancing FAIRness for OBS data within the eFAIRs project

Data from Ocean Bottom Seismometer (OBS) deployments nowadays are routinely integrated in federated seismological data centers, but often without following standardized procedures as recommended by the OBS community. This makes it difficult to locate and exploit these data mainly due to the restrictions imposed by the standard metadata format (stationXML) and the services.

In the context of the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC), supported by OBS experts, we selected AWI and GEOMAR datasets to be archived at the GEOFON data center with standardized procedures according to the FDSN straw man proposal of W. Crawford for OBS data and metadata using also the OBSinfo tools developed at IPGP. In addition, a special emphasis was put on enhancing FAIRness for the selected datasets, for example identifiers of individual instruments were included, which are linked to instrument databases. Keywords were also added to make the data more easily findable and interoperable. From these experiences we formulated guidelines for OBS data management, which should help researchers to archive their OBS data consistently throughout EIDA data centers.