Intern:Project data management/HERMES

Draft for a HERMES data web page

Motivation Beside publications data is one of the major deliverables of any research project and should be archived in a sustainable way. The availability of publications is well established through libraries but a reliable access to data can only be archieved if the data are provided by the principle investigators to an established data center which asures long-term archiving, easy access, widespread distribution and a bibliographic citation. Also as a basis for future scientific work, a research project is urged to add its scientific primary data to an established archive including a description (metadata). Archived data sets should be formated and distributed in the most recent technical and scientific standards.

Data submission and archiving Following the workprogram and deliverables as outlined in the contract existing scientific primary data of relevance to the project as well as new data produced through the projects research should be archived. The latter includes data resulting from expeditions, on board as well as postcruise measurements, documentations and any data related to publications.

In a first step the system will import metadata of cruises and stations (1) as provided together with the cruise report to the project office. Technical quality and consistency is checked by the data manager. Prior to the archiving of the factual data, the metadata related to the data (2) are defined as submitted by the principle investigator toegether with the data. Finaly the factual data are imported (3) and the relations between metadata and data are set. Data related to publication should be archived latest, when a paper is submitted; a password protection is possible until the paper is printed.

Access HERMES is using the information system PANGAEA as an archive, publisher and library for its data. The system provides any technical potential and implementations as required for a modern project data management. It is the technical system of the ICSU World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (WDC-MARE), hosted by AWI and MARUM as the project partner. As an access client for individual queries on predefined data sets, the search engine PangaVista is recommended. The total number and list of data sets of HERMES archived so far is dynamicaly produced by the query http://www.pangaea.de/PangaVista?query=projectlabel:hermes

Examples Data are stored georeferenced in space and time with metainformation in a relational database. Each data set exported is formated by the system and thus is consistent. Data sets can be viewed as a html-web page or downloaded as text-file. To give an impression about content, format and access to data in PANGAEA, examples from some OMARC cluster projects (predecessor of HERMES) are provided. Data are from various sources and research disciplines and have been processed as part of the HERMES deliverable Banking of existing data (D26).


 * ACES - d15N isotope ratios measured on deep water corals
 * ASSEMBLAGE - description of a sediment core as foto and graphic in pdf format
 * ECOMOUND - reflection seismic profile archived as a georeferened cruise track with links to sgy-files
 * EURODELTA - annual mean river discharge from 1980-2000
 * EUROSTRATAFORM - ocanographic profile of a CTD station
 * GEOMOUND - terrain model of the Porcupine Seabight in different formats
 * METROL - geochemistry of a sediment profile
 * PROMESS - downhole logging from a drill site  (password protected)
 * STRATAGEM - linking an atlas

Contact The responsible data manager and contact for data submissions are
 * Hannes Grobe, data librarian of PANGAEA at AWI/WDC-MARE - mailto:hgrobe@pangaea.de
 * Veith Huehnerbach, geologist at NOCS - mailto:vhh@noc.soton.ac.uk
 * Ingo Schewe, biologist at AWI - mailto:ischewe@awi-bremerhaven.de