ALBERT

Description: IN23A-1065: Three large scale projects Cluster of Excellence - 'The Future Ocean', SFB574 - 'Volatiles and Fluids in Subduction Zones', SFB754 - 'Climate - Biogeochemistry Interactions in the Tropical Ocean' and the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences IFM-GEOMAR seek for a joined data management infrastructure for Kiel marine sciences with approximately 1000 researchers from various scientific disciplines. The Kiel Data Management Infrastructure (KDMI) emerges from this large interdisciplinary community, but its concept focusses on the individual scientist and its work. This individual data management approach instead of the classic project based practice avoids redundancy in data management efforts and facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration. The web-based KDMI portal is a starting point of a virtual research platform as an efficient access for all users of the centralized data management. It integrates customized personal and project communities and provides web 2.0 enabled technologies like calendars, wikis and forums supporting daily project activities. Incorporation of essential project infrastructure with a data management system emphasizes data management as part of daily scientific routines instead of different downstream operations per project. Extracting the similarities in observational sciences leads to a process oriented data management approach. Treating the emergence of data even of completely different disciplines like field observations and experimental sciences as a process allows us to store the data in a single consistent data model. The quality of data and meta data is crucial to reusability in future projects. Accordingly the KDMI approach includes peer revision as a quality assurance step within a scientific workflow definition. Utilizing a community working platform for daily scientific work results in increasing efforts put into quality assurance of data and metadata (e.g. CARINA project). Recording the data creation process itself instead of literature references is a novelty in the field of scientific documentation and a possibility to provide complete information for a future quality reassessment. This process fosters the reuse of KDMI datasets. The infrastructure of World Data Centers (WDC) and their cooperation with the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) is the aspired final publication platform for the KDMI data. An essential issue of the KDMI concept is the publication of data in a WDC either as supplement of peer reviewed journal articles or as dataset publication on their own warranting access to the data for the global scientific community.