Towards a networked publication and library system for scientific data - World Data Center Conference 2007; Bremerhaven, Germany, 7-9 May 2007

Almost 50 years ago, the first World Data Centers (WDC) have been founded through the International Council for Scientific Unions (ICSU) in order to archive and distribute data collected from the observational programs of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year. Originally established in the United States, Europe, Russia, and Japan, the WDC system has since expanded to 53 centers in 12 countries. Its holdings include a wide range of solar, geophysical, environmental, and human dimensions data covering timescales ranging from seconds to millennia and providing baseline information for research in many ICSU disciplines, especially for monitoring changes in the geosphere and biosphere-gradual or sudden, foreseen or unexpected, natural or man-made.The conference was hosted by WDC-MARE, the World Data Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM, University of Bremen, Germany), and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (Bremerhaven, Germany). Among the 31 WDCs and 70 conference participants, Bernard Minster and Hartmut Grassl, ICSU Panel on World Data Centers chairs, honored the accomplishments of 50 years scientific data management and contemplated past deficiencies and future requirements. In order to revise a 50 years old structure and to develop appropriate short- and medium-term strategies, the conference was dedicated to four main subjects

Archiving and distributing earth-science data with the PANGAEA information system

The information system PANGAEA - Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data (http://www.pangaea.de) is aimed at archiving, publishing, and distributing data related to climate variability, the marine environment, and the solid earth. The system is a public 'data library' distributing data to the scientific community through the Internet. Data are stored in a relational database in a consistent format with related meta-information following international standards. Data are georeferenced in space and/or time, individually configured subsets may be extracted. Any type of information, data and documents may be served (profiles, maps, photos, graphics, text and numbers). Operation by AWI and MARUM is assured in the long-term. Both institutes provide the technical infrastructure, system management and support for data management for projects and for individual scientists. Most important collections from Antarctic research archived in PANGAEA so far are the data of the Cape Roberts Project, geological maps and age determinations of rocks, a complete set of JGOFS data including those from the Southern Ocean, any marine sediment cores, documantation and analytical data from German expeditions and an increasing inventory of the published data from the running EPICA project