The OneGeochemistry initiative as a CODATA Working Group; bringing together international geochemical data systems for easy data discovery

As geochemical data enable understanding of the Earth system and help to address critical societal issues the organisation thereof is important. Questions asked about processes affecting our environment and geological past become more complex and interdisciplinary in nature as well as multidimensional. To help answer these questions within the geochemistry research capabilities and data compilations are required to be comprehensive and both human and machine readable. Various international organisations are building infrastructure to capture and distribute geochemical data in a consistent manner adhering to the FAIR principles. 

Since May 2021 the OneGeochemistry initiative has officially started efforts towards aligning these organisations’ data frameworks in order to standardise how geochemical data is reported around the globe. In November 2022 the OneGeochemistry initiative applied and was granted to become the OneGeochemistry CODATA Working Group as part of the International Science Councils Committee on Data. The initiative has now also been endorsed by the Geochemical Society, the European Association of Geochemistry and the Working Group has been endorsed by the IUGS Commission on Global Geochemical Baselines. Coordination of the OneGeochemistry initiative is funded through the WorldFAIR project where it is one of the work packages in the larger ‘WorldFAIR: Global cooperation on FAIR data policy and practice’ project. A FAIR Implementation Profile analyses of the geochemistry communities of Australia (AusGeochem), USA (EarthChem, AstroMat) and Europe (GEOROC-DIGIS, EPOS-MSL, NFDI4EARTH) resulted in recognition of the need for common vocabularies for geochemistry data reporting as one of the most important actions to undertake towards international geochemistry data interoperability. A task adopted by EarthChem-DIGIS(GEOROC)-GFZ(DataSystems) collaboration and Research Vocabularies Australia.

Here we will present an overview of the current OneGeochemistry initiative and its preliminary outcomes with regards to FAIR Implementation Profiles and processes that will help enable geochemical data interoperability between various stakeholders.