Standing out in the data crowd: EASYDAB (Earth System Data Branding)

The number of published data from the Earth System Sciences is steadily rising. Even though many of the datasets are published with a DOI, only a part of them complies with the FAIR Data Principles [1]. As in many scientific disciplines, there are a variety of activities in Earth System Sciences that address the FAIRness of the data. What has not been sufficiently investigated and dealt with so far is the easy discoverability and re-use of quality-checked data. This aspect is taken up by the EASYDAB service [2].

The Earth System Data Branding (EASYDAB) was developed within the BMBF [3] funded project AtMoDat [4]. The branding can be adopted by institutions running a data repository.  Chosen Earth system research datasets published with a DataCite [5] DOI can be highlighted with a logo on the landing page [6]. The EASYDAB logo indicates that the datasets have an open [7] license, comply with the FAIR Data Principles to the best knowledge possible, and were reviewed by the responsible repository for compliance with a quality guideline.

The first quality guideline made for EASYDAB is the ATMODAT standard [8]. The standard incorporates concrete recommendations and requirements related to the maturity, publication and enhanced FAIRness of atmospheric model data. The requirements are for rich metadata with controlled vocabularies, structured landing pages, file formats (netCDF) and the structure within files. Human- and machine-readable landing pages are a core element of the ATMODAT standard and should hold and present discipline-specific metadata on simulation and variable levels. 

The integration of standards from other disciplines in the Earth System Sciences into EASYDAB is desirable if they achieve a comparably high quality of the published data as defined in the ATMODAT standard. EASYDAB highlights the efforts of repositories to publish data with high maturity. It enables users to easily find reviewed, high-quality data.

1: Wilkinson et al., 2016: https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18 

2: https://www.easydab.de

3: Federal Ministry of Education and Research https://www.bmbf.de/en/index.html

4: https://www.atmodat.de

5: https://DataCite.org

6: https://support.datacite.org/docs/landing-pages

7: https://opendefinition.org/licenses/ 

8: https://cera-www.dkrz.de/WDCC/ui/cerasearch/entry?acronym=atmodat_standard_en_v3_0