Dr. Jens Klump

The Benefits of Cross Linking: The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program

The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) addresses fundamental scientific problems of global importance as an element of geological and geophysical research programs. It seeks geological sites from around the world and involves the international community of scientists to optimize the results from drilling. Besides scientific and technical consulting to ICDP projects the ICDP Operational Support Group (OSG) offers data management in the field, and during the analysis and publication phases of scientific drilling project. Operational data management is based on the ICDP Drilling Information System (DIS), which allows data capture in the field and transfer to a central database at GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ).
Since the start of ICDP, data sharing has played an important part in ICDP projects and the OSG has facilitated dissemination of data within project groups and encourages the sharing of data to promote scientific progress. With the online Scientific Drilling Database (SDDB, http://www.scientificdrilling.org) ICDP and GFZ Potsdam created a platform for the dissemination of data from drilling projects. The thematic focus of SDDB is on data that were used as the basis of a publication. All data publications in SDDB are citeable and accessible through Digital Object Identifiers (DOI). In addition, SDDB maintains a record of links from its datasets to the literature, where the data are interpreted and will in future also reference the samples from which the data were derived. This network of data, literature and physical samples can be shared with other data providers and portals to enhance discovery of data through discipline specific catalogues. Novel added-value services may be developed by exploiting the semantic nature of this network.