Dublin Tephra Standardization Writing Workshop
July 27-August 2, 2019

Beginning with the consensus document (with three appendices) resulting from the Tephra 2014 Workshop, this is the document repository for the Tephra 2014, 2017 and 2019 Workshops on standardization.

The immediate goal of the tephra standardization effort is to translate checklists developed at the Tephra 2014 Workshop and developed since into templates for direct use by researchers in the field and in the lab. More specifically, we seek to:

  1. Translate checklists (generated at the Tephra 2014 workshop and vetted through personal contacts and later meetings) into templates − distribute initially by including as supplements to the consensus paper;
  2. work with THROUGHPUT and Earthchem to develop a geochemical template that is tephra specific; both (1) and (2) are consistent with NSF Venture Fund workshop goal, “1. Develop draft data standards and/or data policies for geosciences data or other research products of interest to a scientific community.

The current state of the checklists and narrative statements are given in Appendices I--IV below , (PDF copies are available at: https://vhub.org/resources/3860/supportingdocs).

Motivating documents include:

Our goal is to produce templates that researchers can fill in (either on paper or electronically through MS Excel, StraboSpot or a RDBMS) to allow maximum inter-usability of tephra data by interested researchers. We anticipate that these templates can first be uploaded to Vhub or other platform for near-term use by researchers, and eventually be incorporated into a consensus document.

Collaborators and sponsors

vhub.org

A copy of this document is available on Vhub

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NSF

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NSF EarthCube

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Goals of the Venture Fund

The focus is to improve access and discovery of geosciences data and metadata, broadly defined (i.e., observational, experimental, and aggregated datasets; models and simulation outputs; physical samples and specimens). This aligns with NSF's Public Access initiative to make the products of research publicly available and with EarthCube’s effort to promote data discovery and access. Scientific communities may develop agreements on data standards that can be useful for NSF Data Policy and Management Plans. They may also prepare whitepapers or other documents describing data policies, pathways for adoption, identification of resources to serve their needs or gaps in resources.

The primary funding mechanism will be through workshops to support research communities to develop tangible outcomes to improve data availability. The focus of these workshops and working groups can include any of the following

  1. Develop draft data standards and/or data policies for geosciences data or other research products of interest to a scientific community.
  2. Identify the most important/useful datasets for a community or a science goal and how those datasets will be made more accessible.
  3. Identify data resources that could serve as robust repositories or access points to research products, and promote adoption of these resources within scientific communities
  4. Conduct a gap analysis for what is required to make data more widely accessible and available.
  5. Create an assessment framework to evaluate existing infrastructure, policies, and education to promote data availability. That is, how would the data standards advance science, and how would compliance by researchers be measured? Science use cases to test the framework are possible mechanisms for assessment. Describing training needs to advance standards adoption and data literacy in the research community is also appropriate.
  6. Develop plans to continue work towards adopting and/or implementing standards, including the identification of existing groups or creation of a working group.

Organizing committee

Download the latest templates and checklist