JISC

UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is recognised as a world-leading centre for the analysis and provision of climate datasets, including a widely-used global temperature record. Recommendations arising from inquiries into the 2009 hacking of emails from CRU are that additional focus should be placed on making available climate research data and that these should include, wherever possible, both raw and processed data, with processing methods and codes. This project will develop an approach to publishing climate research data, including full provenance information. A ‘linked-data’ approach will be used, supporting emerging open data principles and citeable links with research publications. The outcomes should be relevant to the wider climate science community as well as to other fields of research, where data should be regarded as a scientific resource with equivalent importance as the research publication.

Aims and objectives

The project aims to develop an approach to citing and publishing climate research data to facilitate re-use, and providing full provenance information for processed data. The approach we develop will be applied to four high-profile climate research datasets. Specifically, we will:
• develop an information architecture addressing the scientific data workflows that arise in some aspects of climate research
• deploy infrastructure to capture relevant metadata for climate research data, software, and workflows
• develop a ‘linked-data’ approach to publishing and citing climate research data
• prototype our approach using four climate research datasets: CRUTEM, CRU TS, an example set of tree-ring chronologies used to develop climate reconstructions, and HadCET.

Project methodology

The project is a partnership between:

• UEA’s Climatic Research Unit: a world-leading centre producing and analysing some of the most widely-used datasets in climate research
• STFC’s e-Science Centre: plays a leading role in managing research data for the UK academic sector.

UEA will contribute climate research expertise, software, and data. STFC will develop the data citation and publishing architecture. The two partners will work together on developing a prototype for the four climate datasets.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

Major outputs from the project will include:

• an information architecture addressing important data and processing workflows
• deployed tools for managing climate research software and data
• a ‘linked-data’ approach to publishing climate data (RDF climate data model, linked-data server, citation infrastructure)
• deployed prototype with various climate datasets

 Technology / Standards used

A number of standards and technologies will be used in this project, including: RDF, OAI-ORE, Climate Science Modelling Language (CSML), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, netCDF file format, etc