Enhancing FAIRness of global air quality data: The Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report database

In a community effort involving more than 200 scientists from over 60 countries, the Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report (TOAR) [1, 2] has recently produced the first comprehensive analysis of global tropospheric ozone changes. A major factor of its success and widespread reception is the extensive database of global surface observations, which has been built with multi-faceted metadata and user-friendly web services in the spirit of Open Data and the FAIR principles. TOAR data are made available via a graphical web interface [3], a REST service [4] and as aggregated products on PANGAEA [5] together with software tools for data analysis.
In preparation of the 2^nd phase of TOAR we are now revising the database schema to further enhance FAIRness of this global air quality data holding and to align the TOAR data services with principles defined by the RDA [6] and EOSC-hub [7]. The new structure of the database seeks to enhance data documentation especially with respect to traceability and provenance. By blending controlled vocabulary and ontologies with less constrained fulltext fields we will be able to preserve any metadata supplied to us without the need to reach a broad community consensus about metadata standardisation (which would be impossible to accomplish). The redesign of the TOAR data infrastructure also includes further standardisation of the web service infrastructures and automated data quality control tools. In this context, AAI (Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure) and data licensing are important aspects of consideration. Last not least, providing TOAR data users with a flexible and powerful infrastructure for data access and online analysis raises some performance issues, which require the exploration of modern concepts and tools for distributed workflows.

[1] http://www.igacproject.org/activities/TOAR

[2] https://collections.elementascience.org/toar

[3] https://join.fz-juelich.de/

[4] https://join.fz-juelich.de/services/rest/surfacedata/

[5] https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.876108

[6] https://rd-alliance.org/

[7] https://www.eosc-hub.eu/news/guidelines-scientific-content-providers-eosc-hub