Building a Portal for Interdisciplinary Planetary Data

In 2010, the Alliance of Science Organisations (Allianz der Wissenschaftsorganisationen) in Germany responded to the increasing amount of research data by adopting ‘Principles for the Handling of Research Data’ (Alliance of Science Organisations, 2010). In 2015, the German Research Foundation followed suit and aligned its ‘Guidelines on the Handling of Research Data’ (DFG, 2015) with these ‘Principles’. In accordance with DFG’s ‘Guidelines’, the collaborative research center TRR 170 (Late Accretion to Terrestrial Planets) has adopted a policy how to manage long-term archiving and accessibility of its research data.

Research data generated in TRR 170 subprojects are diverse reflecting the range of methods used, including laboratory and other instrumental data on planetary samples, remote sensing data, geological maps and model simulations. Accordingly, the strong interdisciplinary alignment of the TRR 170 research network comprises heterogeneous data and different data formats.

During the first funding period, we built a file management and database system, TRR 170-DB, to manage data of TRR 170. TRR 170-DB is operated on the open source data management software Dataverse and can be accessed via a web portal, the Planetary Data Portal. TRR170-DB and Dataverse’s functionalities ensure that each step in the data lifecycle of research data is met. The Planetary Data Portal is hosted on a VM server and provides storage for published and unpublished TRR 170 data for access within the TRR 170 network. We use up-to-date programming standards and languages (JavaScript, PHP, HTML, CSS, SQL) to customize interactions between users and TRR 170-DB. The file management and database software Dataverse provides standard-compliant metadata to ensure that metadata can be mapped easily to several standard metadata schemas (Dublin Core, Worldmap, DDI, VO, etc.).

Research data stored in TRR170-DB can take advantage of a Dataverse functionality that provides digital object identifiers (DOI) through DataCite services. DOI assigned research data are traceable and thus facilitates reproducible research.

The landscape of repositories in the planetary sciences is highly fragmented and dispersed between different scientific disciplines. A key aspect of the future development of the Planetary Data Portal is to bring together data and relevant information from different planetary communities. The Planetary Data Portal will serve as a single access point to various communities, including planetary sample data and experimental studies, planetary missions, geophysical modeling and astrophysics/astronomy.