Tectonic Storytelling with Open Source Tools

The communication of ongoing advances in research to the common public for education and decision making is an important task modern scientific work.

Another important task, is to gain recognition within the scientific community usually measured in citation counts. In the last years, the concept of citation has been extended from textual publications to include data and software publications

This paper presents a case study for science communication and data citation. For this, research data from the AGH University of Science and Technology, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS),recent citation practices for data and the upcoming AV-portal of the German National Library for Science and Technology are combined.

This creates mutual benefits for the stakeholders: Target audiences receive information on the latest research results, while the recognition of the underlying scientific work is increased by the stringent use of Digital Object Indentifiers (DOI).

The advances in FOSS geologic modelling tools provides novel approaches to communicate the concepts of Plate Tectonics: The software package GPlates allows to visualise and manipulate plate-tectonic reconstructions and associated data through geological time. This capability is augmented by the Science on a Halfsphere project (SoaH) with a robust and intuitive visualisation hardware environment.

In a test scenario, tectonic models for the Paleozoic could be used for science communication for the Geopark Bergstraße Odenwald via the GPlates/SoaH hardware- and software stack.As scientific story-telling events are volatile by nature, recordings are a natural means of preservation for further use, reference and analysis.

For this, the upcoming portal for audiovisual media (“AV-Portal”) of the German National Library for Science and Technology TIB is expected to become a critical service infrastructure. It allows complex search queries, including metadata such as DOI, closing the link between data citation and science communication.