Cyber Infrastructure
Cyber Infrastructure for science is a collaboratively and sustainably evolving socio-technical system of systems including humans, instruments, software, computing devices, and electronic storage intended to support and advance science and ensure reproducibility.
We are building a list of active cyber infrastructure development groups. If you have suggestions and/or are Interested in joining the working group, please email: earthtime4567@gmail.com with ‘Cyber Infrastructure Working Group’ in the subject line.
Geochron.org
Geochron.org is a database system designed to capture complete data and metadata to document geochronologic age estimation, allowing future reuse, recalculation, and integration with other data.
The goal is to capture this information at its source–the data reduction programs used in labs to analyze and reduce data coming directly from instrumentation. The human operators of the equipment should not need to re-enter data that are acquired or generated by computers in the first place.
Data can be ingested from a variety of data reduction programs that are used widely in the various geochronology and thermochronology communities. These programs have been adapted to seamlessly upload standardized data to the Geochron.org database with minimal input from the operator.
Cirdles.org
Cirdles.org is the Cyber Infrastructure Research & Development Lab for the Earth Sciences,
an undergraduate computer science software engineering initiative at the The College of Charleston , Charleston, SC. It specializes in the collaborative development of free open source software to support earth science domains. Please visit github.com/CIRDLES to explore the software products.
Geochronology Frontier at the Laboratory-Cyberinformatics Interface
This project supports a partnership between geochronologists who have built and run laboratory facilities that are designed to measure the ages of rocks using radioisotopic and astronomical methods, geoscientists who are building synthetic databases that depend critically on accurate and precise ages of rocks in order to test hypotheses in the Earth and life sciences, and computer scientists who are building infrastructure components that are now being used broadly in education and research. The aim is to address a ‘grand challenge’ in the Earth sciences: to develop a fully integrated four-dimensional digital Earth so that we may fully understand dynamic Earth system evolution through time.