Parent

If several data sets should be made citable through a single citation, those child sets first have to be grouped in a parent set. This is just a technical process as a prerequisite to make an entity of several data sets citable. The DOI of the childs remain as a technical DOI, the DOI of the parent set will become a citation DOI as part of the official data citation.

On the Internet, e.g. in PangaVista, a parent set is presented with its list of included childs, also providing the opportunity to download all childs in one zip-archive. Consequently a parent set can not contain data sets with static URL! Child sets can not belong to more than one parent set.

Case 1: supplementary data to a reference are to be made citable and the data consist of more than one set, all data sets related to the reference are grouped in a parent set.
 * Example of a parent set with [supplementary data to the reference given] including 6 childs:

Case 2: a number of data sets are defined by the PI as a citable entity (e.g. could be all meteorological observations of one expedition). The data sets are grouped to a parent by the Pangaea editor, an abstract is added and the parent is made citable after proof read.
 * Example of a parent set including 10 unpublished child sets:

A parent set is technicaly defined by the editor in the following steps:
 * in 4D data set table those sets which should be grouped to a parent are selected by a retrieval,
 * all relevant entries in the list are selected
 * click on 
 * some fields will be filled with default entries, depending on the entries in the related sets
 * add or change all metadata as appropriate
 * add abstract and technical comments
 * 
 * check validity in PangaVista