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

Abstract

Open and persistent access to past, present, and future scientific data is fundamental for transparent and reproducible data-driven research. The scientific 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 identified 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, qualifications, and opportunities for librarians/information professionals in the data era.