The Tephra Information Portal (TIP): A Community-Driven Approach to Facilitating Access and Reuse of FAIR Tephra Data and Samples

Over the past decade, communities within the geosciences have formed around the development of best practices for sharing data and samples, driven by the need to make access and reuse of data easier and to grow confidence and trust in research results through transparency and reproducibility. But moving principles to practices encounters challenges and communities specifically identified problems with finding data and tools relevant to the community, and lack of resources to create reliable and sustainable infrastructure for storing, archiving, and reusing data. Aiming to help communities overcome these challenges, the NSF-funded IEDA2 data facility established ‘EarthChem Communities’ as a platform to promote community specific FAIR-compliant data best practices and to facilitate access to the data. EarthChem’s ‘Tephra Community’ has been the most active and mature one. In 2024, this community embarked on a collaborative project with IEDA2 to develop a more scalable and comprehensive set of resources for communities to improve their data sharing practices - the Framework for FAIR Data Communities (FFDC). The new NSF Tephra Information Portal (TIP) project now serves as a development prototype and test case for the FFDC.

The TIP has two main objectives: 1. to provide a central point of discovery and access of data in currently distributed and disconnected tephra data resources, and 2. to offer guidance and tools for researchers to adopt the best practices of the Tephra Community, publishing their data in a way that ensures they are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (= FAIR). For its first version, the TIP has been working with existing cyberinfrastructure resources relevant to tephra research (EarthChem, PetDB, GeoDIVA, SESAR, TephraBase, StraboSpot) to connect these to the central search and access hub. Work has so far focused on designing and developing interoperability between external systems and the central data discovery hub, and on the development of the user interface for data search and display. A dedicated TIP API has been developed to function as a proxy and data-aggregation layer, integrating mapped data from partner systems through a federated architecture, in which a single client request triggers concurrent queries across participating services. The TIP user interface reuses core search components developed for the EarthChem PetDB project, including the map interface, dynamic filter selection, point-selection popovers, responsive layouts, and MUI-based data tables.  In this presentation, we will present the first version of the TIP Search Interface, which connects tephra data in EarthChem’s PetDB database, data in the GeoDIVA database of the Alaska Volcano Observatory and SESAR (System for Earth Sample Registration). Work is still ongoing to connect TephraBase data. We will also report on lessons learned so far. Semantic misalignment across sources, conflicting vocabularies, overloaded or ambiguous metadata fields, and duplicates are major challenges that present roadblocks to the hub development.