Assessing FAIRness for Earth and Environmental Data - Use Case by Dataterra and PANGAEA

In this use case, we intend to discuss potential FAIR metrics for the Earth and Environmental Sciences community (here: solid earth and oceans excluding atmosphere and biosphere) in collaboration with projects such as FAIR-EASE, Blue-Cloud and ENVRI-FAIR. For this purpose, we want to analyse the FAIR habits of this community to find out if there are similarities in the use of e.g. identifiers, standards and vocabularies that justify deriving their own FAIR metrics from the existing FAIRsFAIR metrics. We will investigate existing technical interfaces for metadata exchange and use FAIR implementation profiles of relevant data archives.

Initiatives such as GEOSS or OGC have contributed in recent years to the fact that the level of standardization of earth and environmental science data repositories is generally quite high. In addition, there are a number of ongoing EU projects dealing with the implementation of the FAIR principles in this community.  However, the Earth science community is quite diverse and there is no common understanding of FAIR so far. Using the example of some established research infrastructures from different fields of earth and environmental sciences, we will first investigate how homogeneous the use of FAIR implementation resources such as metadata standards or vocabularies is and try to develop metrics for the community or for appropriate parts of this community.