Practices, Challenges, and Prospects of Big Data Curation: a Case Study in Geoscience

Abstract

Open and persistent access to past, present, and future scientifc data is fundamental for transparent and reproducible data-driven research. The scientifc community is now facing both challenges and opportunities caused by the growingly complex disciplinary data systems. Concerted efforts from domain experts, information professionals, and Internet technology experts are essential to ensure the accessibility and interoperability of the big data. Here we review current practices in building and managing big data within the context of large data infrastructure, using geoscience cyberinfrastructure such as Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA) and EarthCube as a case study. Geoscience is a data-rich discipline with a rapid expansion of sophisticated and diverse digital data sets. Having started to embrace the digital age, the community have applied big data and data mining tools into the new type of research. We also identify current challenges, key elements, and prospects to construct a more robust and future-proof big data infrastructure for research and publication for the future, as well as the roles, qualifcations, and opportunities for librarians1information professionals in the data era. Received 06 May 2019 ~ Accepted 11 September 2019 Correspondence should be addressed to Suzhen Chen, Cataloging Department, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Library, 2550 McCarthy Mall, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822. Email: suzhen@hawaii.edu The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. The IJDC is published by the University of Edinburgh on behalf of the Digital Curation Centre. ISSN: 1746-8256. URL: http://www.ijdc.net/ Copyright rests with the authors. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, version 4.0. For details please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ International Journal of Digital Curation 2020, Vol. 14, Iss. 1, 275–291 275 http:11dx.doi.org110.22181ijdc.v14i1.669 DOI: 10.22181ijdc.v14i1.669 276 | Practices, Challenges and Prospects of Big Data Curation doi:10.2218/ijdc.v14i1.669