DeCODER | EarthCube

Democratized Cyberinfrastructure for Open Discovery to Enable Research

Standardize how scientific data is described

Allow search engines for scientific data to support discoverability AND
Facilitate the usage of the data

The new NSF CSSI Democratized Cyberinfrastructure for Open Discovery to Enable Research (DeCODER) project will expand and extend the successful EarthCube GeoCODES framework and community to unify data and tool description and reuse across geoscience domains. (See announcement.)

GeoCODES Portal

Adoption of science-on-schema

The internet works because of defined standards and protocols (e.g. TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML). This allows software, which must be sustained, to change and evolve over time, with better software with new features to emerge (e.g. new browsers, new web servers), while still allowing everything to just work from the user perspective.

That’s what we are doing here for research data through the adoption of science-on-schema.

DeCODER will continue to partner with ESIP and the Council of Data Facilities with the adoption of this standard across the partnering geoscience data centers, building search aggregators that can now crawl data center collections and construct a centralized index by which users, or other software through a provided API, can find data of interest across all available sources.

Science applications

To understand and address critical geosciences challenges we must find and leverage data and tools from across national and international facilities and programs. While building a flexible and extensible framework to fit many geosciences domains, the DeCODER project will also work with three specific communities, to ensure a tight connection to real science needs: