Established in 2018 by the EarthCube Science Support Office (ESSO) at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) through the pilot work on efforts to better enable cross-domain discovery of and access to geoscience data and research tools, the GeoCODES pilot has been extended as a deployed resource to highlight what can be done for the geoscience research and education community through the adoption of standardizations around metadata. Building on the ESSO effort, the current EarthCube Office (ECO) has been diligently working to create a seamless data pipeline that allows users to discover data across the geoscience community.
The updated version of GeoCODES has been developed by ECO with regular input from EarthCube governance, including feedback on user stories, and the GeoCODES roadmap. This “new” version of GeoCODES not only brings with it a new user interface, but also brings together datasets and tools, identified from resources such as the resource registry - highlighting within query results tools that can be used with returned datasets.
GeoCODES is comprised of three specific components:
an evolving standard for exposing data that uses Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP)'s science on schema,
a set of tools to index relevant data from partners within the EarthCube Council of Data Facilities who have adopted science on schema, plus a portal to query that data, and
New GeoCODES capabilities will include:
an interface designed using user interface (UI)/user experience (UX) methodologies to provide a clean and simple interface while still providing the ability to do more complex searches,
a faceted search - allowing users to filter search results based on additional criteria,
a dataset landing page that provides full details on a dataset within search results,
a combined data and tools search interface that allows users to search for both datasets and software tools in a single search, and
tools associated with data - for example, when a researcher searches GeoCODES for data, potential tools and software packages are suggested
Aiming to evolve with technology and methodology shifts popular in the community, ECO is mindful that over time, notebooks may be more popular for interfacing with EarthCube tools and data than the GeoCODES portal itself. To that end, the ECO Tech Team and EarthCube Governance are working on initiatives that solicit notebooks to demonstrate this functionality and utilize GeoCODES APIs. This has several additional benefits for those wanting to use notebooks in their teaching, for exposing new methods in geosciences research, and for demonstrating reproducibility.
EarthCube, ESIP, and the Council of Data Facilities have piloted the adoption of GeoCODES across partnering geoscience data centers - building search aggregators that 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.
A sneak peak of the GeoCODES beta release is now available at the following URL: https://beta.geocodes.earthcube.org. Please leave us your feedback via the link in the footer.
