OneGeochemistry: Enabling a coordinated online global network of multiple distributed geochemical repositories and databases

Since the discipline of ‘geochemistry’ was first defined in 1838, geochemical data has been pervasively acquired and used in the Earth, environmental and planetary sciences and become fundamental for understanding past, present, and future processes in natural systems. Initially, geochemical data was published in hard-copy literature, but as analytical systems became computerised, major digital databases emerged (EarthChem, PetDB, OZCHEM and GEOROC) which revolutionised data access. They have proven the power of re-use of geochemical data around thematic, national and global themes, and now enable new Big Data science paradigms in geochemistry.

In response to Open Access policies and science demands, even more geochemical database systems are emerging at national, programmatic, and subdomain levels. They are not coordinated: each has different schemas/vocabularies and analyses can be duplicated within them, making global merging of datasets complex. Very little data is FAIR (Wilkinson et al., 2016) and the lack of agreed standards and unique identifiers makes online interoperability time consuming.

Following the example of OneGeology, which was developed to increase online accessibility of geological map data, we propose an equivalent global initiative - OneGeochemistry. The vision is to establish a global geochemical data network of distributed repositories that facilitates and promotes discovery/access to geochemical data. Fundamental to OneGeochemistry is coordination and collaboration amongst international geochemical data providers and infrastructures such as the NFDI4Earth, EPOS, AuScope, etc., to create community-agreed standards, controlled vocabularies and protocols for each of the fundamental geochemical and isotopic systems [i.e., inorganic, organic, isotopes (Ar-Ar, U-Pb, Sm-Nd etc.)].