EPOS CSS - Facilitating the discovery and reuse of Controlled Source Seismic data

Controlled Source Seismic (CSS) data are key to understanding the structure and composition of the lithosphere at different scales. They are highly valuable both in their own right and as input to multidisciplinary studies and Earth system modelling. The challenge for scientists is to find existing data, assess their relevance for a particular purpose, and eventually get access and permission to reuse selected data sets.

The European research infrastructure for solid Earth sciences EPOS (European Plate Observing System) was designed to solve such problems. It is a multidisciplinary, distributed research infrastructure that facilitates the integrated use of data, data products, and facilities from the solid Earth science community. FAIR principles are put into practice, enabling access to data and products from hundreds of scientific data services across Europe. Data services provided by EPOS are defined in a bottom-up approach by the experts in the respective thematic communities. However, CSS data are not available through EPOS. Primarily, because EPOS was lacking the support of a dedicated CSS community.

At EGU24, a community building effort started with the aim of bringing CCS data to EPOS. Early on, the informal community defined two targets: Firstly, to develop a data model for data set discovery, as no existing standards or common practices for describing CSS data sets could be identified. Secondly, to develop and provide best practices for the publication of academic data sets. As of early 2026, a data service that works with an EPOS test-environment was implemented successfully, and the data model is being tested. Community and technical integration with EPOS will be discussed during SPM58 at EGU26.

This presentation focuses on the discovery data model (“scientific metadata”). Discovery data connect the user from a single entry point (the EPOS portal) with the data, which are distributed, i.e. stored at various locations. To make this practically feasible, the following requirements were established: i) sufficient detail to describe complex datasets, ii) a limited set of obligatory attributes, to avoid conflicts that could shut out potential data providers, and iii) the use of controlled vocabularies wherever possible. Core (obligatory) attributes state that a data set exists and includes information on survey and campaign names, year, geolocation, content, access via URI and license. These are supplemented by (optional) descriptive and technical attributes, which are meant to provide scientists with sufficient information for the selection of relevant data sets. The former include information on organisations, purpose, source and sensor types, scale, processing and description. The latter provide details like spacings, offsets, number of points and channels.

A successful data discovery is meant to conclude with accessing the selected data via the URI provided in the core attribute. These URIs resolve to a (human and machine-readable) landing page at the data repository that contains details on the mode of access, citation and other information that is regarded as relevant by the data provider.

The CSS community invites interested colleagues to participate and contribute (please contact the first author).