EUDAT 2020 (2015-2018): GFZ

EUDAT 2020

The EPOS seismological community has been selected as one of the communities mature enough in order to uptake EUDAT services. In particular, the European Integrated Data Archive (EIDA) has been identified as a pilot project within EPOS. EIDA is a distributed data centre established to securely archive seismic waveform data and related metadata, gathered by European research infrastructures, and to provide transparent access to the archives by the geosciences research communities. Three nodes from EIDA are using EUDAT services as a pilot project to complement existing EIDA services and evaluate the feasibility of including the other EIDA nodes.

GFZ-GEOFON is one of these three nodes taking part on EUDAT2020, as well as one of the driving forces within EIDA. The main tasks taken on by GFZ in this project are the safe replication of the archive, the federated identity management and the constant tracking of changes in the (meta)data.

Safe replication: the off-site replication of the GEOFON archive (~70 TB) will be realised with the support of our partner institution within the Helmholtz Association (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology - KIT). In the long-term we plan to make use of the replica(s) to improve the quality of our service (redundancy and load balancing). Persistent Identifiers will also be attributed to the data and metadata.

Identity Management: the implementation of a federated identity management to be used within EIDA will allow users to still interact with EIDA as a unified virtual data centre, even if they want to access restricted data through FDSN web services. Users will be authenticated by the institution to which the user belongs, so that EIDA does not need to have a centralized users database and manage passwords.

Data Discovery: We will make our metadata available to the B2FIND discovery service. B2FIND is a metadata catalog of research data collections stored in EUDAT data centres and other repositories. By means of this, users will be able to find collections of scientific data, irrespective of their origin, discipline or community. GEOFON will potentially enlarge its audience by signposting its data and let any data discovery services to relate this to the data from other scientific disciplines.

Dynamic Data: the development of techniques to track changes in the data and metadata will allow the reconstruction of the data sent at any point in time. This will be a key factor to allow the reproducibility of scientific results.