Talk:Project data management/HERMES

Dear all, As you know, HERMES has an annual review which is carried out by the EC with the aid of external reviewers. I attended a session in Brussels in June where I had to answer numerous questions from the independent reviewers. The report of the reviewers was passed to the EC and I now have the formal response from the EC on which we need to act. Overall the project has been well received - it is an extremely complex project with a very large number of partners and we have achieved a great deal in the first year. However, no project of this scale could expect to be perfect and we have been asked to address 4 areas. The EC asks us to

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4. WP9 has the huge task of putting together (a) HERMES data management system. It relies largely on the existing PANGAEA data bank and data access system and has developed an interactive HERMES data portal. The layout and interactivity of PANGAEA are, however, disappointing because HERMES, a large European scale initiative, appears as a one line project together with single cruises, most of which (are) national, with no hierarchy between single-cruise national projects and multi-cruise international initiatives. The PANGAEA portal should be redesigned to insure visibility for large international programs such as HERMES, to help users progression with a hierarchy of entries: project to cruise to type of data (sampling location, chemical data, bathymetry, seismic or gravity etc., to site, to individual data set), and to improve the visual appearance and informativeness of these entries.

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Phil Weaver, coordinator, 2006-07-14

Dear Phil Weaver,

thank you for distributing the comments of the reviewers. Due to the fact, that it contains a strong criticism to the data management, we need to discuss this in our group how to respond to it. Perhaps you could help us to better understand the comments of the reviewers. When ever there is some written original comments from the EU, we would appreciate to have those. The field of data management is predestinated for misunderstandings; I would like to avoid those.

(1) in particular we do not understand: ... HERMES appears as a one line project together with single cruises, most of which (are) national ...

(2) if we understand the following correct, it would ask for a highly complex funktionality on web pages. do we realy want this ? ... hierarchy of entries: project to cruise to type of data ...

(3) I would be very much interested, wether during the discussion with reviewers and EU the problem of data availability was addressed (no data - no functionality). Are reviewers and EU aware of the general problem of a nearly 'non existing data flow' from investigators to archives?

With best regards Hannes Grobe (2006-07-17)

Hello Hannes

Phil apologises for not having replied to your email concerning the criticism of the Panagea interface in the HERMES reivew - he has been very busy with meetings for most of the last week nad has not had time to catch up. The full text relating to the EC's comments on WP9 was given in Phil's email to you.

I was present at the reivew meeting and can fill you on on what was discussed regarding data management. The reviewers were concerned that when they went to PangaVista and typed in 'HERMES', they got a long list of all the 'hits' for HERMES, with no hierarchical division of results. Now, I understand that this is because Pangaea is a relational database and simply typing in 'HERMES' will bring up all the results for that particular search term, but I suspect that the reviewers did not know or understand this which is why they were so critical. However, we have to bear in mind that this is what any scientist will get if they go to Panagaea and want to see what data has been collected within the HERMES project.

I think that we do need to improve the way that the search results are presented, OR explain clearly on the search page that simply typing in a project name will bring up all data entries containing that keyword. It should be explained that for more specific serches within HERMES, the user should enter more specific search terms, eg 'HERMES Gulf of Lions bathymetry' or whatever.

I guess it was not clear to the reviewers that the visualisation tool for HERMES metadata is actually the GIS system, and that Pangaea is more for data archiving. The problem is that the reviewers had only a short time to read the Annual Report and the DOW and perhaps did not fully grasp the relationship between these two facilities. In fact, I suspect that a proportion of HERMES partners probably do not understand it either!

Therefore, I have a couple of suggestions since clearly we must take some action to make the project metadata/data more accessible for those who are not involved in the project:

1) Is it possible to amend the PangaVista search page to prompt people to type in more specific search terms, or at least explain that a one-word search will bring up all hits containing that word? The full list of results is truly baffling to someone who doesn't understand how the database works, and in fact I have to agree with the reviewers that the current results format (without explaination) is very user-unfriendly.

2) If someone types in 'HERMES' into the search box, is it possible to link this to an intermediate page which explains that metadata (ie, sampling points etc) can be viewed via the HERMES GIS facility, or that they can continue serching the HERMES datasets using specific search terms?

We definitely need to find a way to make the HERMES material more easily accessible, and the EC will be looking for evidence that we are addressing this in the new DoW which I am about to finalise. Therefore, we need to add a line to the WP table to describe our steps towards this. It could be something quite vague like "improve visibility of project metadata and data on the Pangaea web interface".

I do need to get the DoW finished and submitted next week, so I would appreciate a quick reply. With best regards Vikki Gun (2006-07-21)