EGU 2018 Ian McHarg Lecture

Editor's Notes

• #3: I am incredibly honored and humbled by this medal, and I really would like you to know how much this means to me. So before I start getting into the topic of RDI, I would like to take a brief detour and talk a little bit about how I got here and what the significance of this honor is in my life. In 1982 I was about ready to finish my dissertation in petrology when I got pregnant, married, and became a housewife. The scientific work that I was doing came to an end and my career seemed to be over before it had even started. Two years after my son was born, I took a half-time position as lab technician at the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry in town, and even though it did not pay any real money, it brought me back into the research environment. I had amazing colleagues, who encouraged me to finish my PhD, and supported me through a rough couple of years, when I tried to be a mom during the day and catch up with science at night. But it was the best thing I have done, and I am so grateful to all those colleagues. Without that PhD, I would not have been able to get the position as Staff Associate at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, when I moved to the US in 1996. In that position I had two main duties: to run a geochemistry lab and to build a database for volcanic rock geochemistry. And that was the beginning
• #5: A lecture like this is a great opportunity to reflect on the past, where we started off and where we got to, and use the experiences that we collected ourselves in our work and the insights gained through broader developments – be they good or bad – to inform decisions regarding the future.
• #6: I will take two different looks at the past: one is using the work of historians, economists, social scientists, and information scientists to understand the development of infrastructures and how insights can inform the development of data and cyberinfrastructure. In 2007 while preparing a presentation for a NSF workshop that was convened to envision the future of Geoinformatics in the US and globally, I found a report written by Paul Edwards and colleagues that was a real eye-opener and helped me and I think many others to put ongoing activities aimed at building cyberinfrastructure into a context. Just last month, while preparing for this lecture, I ran into a paper by Peter Wittenburg and George Strawn that builds on the same classic book by Thomas Hughes to define the path of data infrastructure for the future.
• #7: The other one is based on my own experiences along the path of building data infrastructure for the solid earth sciences, especially the experiences gained in the creation and operation of the Interdisciplinary Earth data Alliance that I am directing.
• #8: I word of caution first: The data universe is highly complex and diverse. I cannot possibly aspire to cover all topics and address every aspect. I am a geoscientist ...
• #9: Vision: Enable an open, extensible, and evolvable digital science ecosystem. Facilitate research data, information, knowledge, and data tools discovery. Enhance problem-solving processes. Move and connect scientific data across scientific disciplines Manage scientific workflows Interoperation between scientific data and literature Integrated science policy framework Networked digital data systems & libraries that interoperate
• #10: There are a number of drivers behind building data infrastructure: There is an ever growing, and maybe exponentially growing volume of data acquired in the sciences in general, and specifically in the Earth sciences where new data acquisition technologies and computing capabilities are used to gather observations from space, in the oceans, and on land, to simulate earth processes and to generate models that predict future paths. And there are data and the technologies to mine, analyze and visualize data are giving us new insights into the way the earth works and
• #14: Lots of reports have come out.
• #16: There is no doubt that infrastructures have a profound effect on nature of modern human societies Roman water supply system Opened the way to building the largest capital in ancient times, Railroad systems Allowed to exchange people & goods at unknown speeds and facilitated the first industrial revolution, Global electrification Changed the availability of power and facilitated the second industrial revolution. The Internet with its web applications Changed the availability of information and facilitated new kinds of businesses.
• #17: Start with test installations, followed up by small size installations, then being extended stepwise to interconnected systems
• #20: “Attraction and convergence are driven mainly by efficiency and economic concerns. The benefit of convergence is the belief of stakeholders that a stable fundament has been built, on top of which new investments and developments can be made to fully exploit the new technologies and infrastructures.”
• #21: FAIR principles are a major milestone that represents an ‘attractor’ in the solution space. But FAIR principles express policy goals. They need to be translated into actions
• #42: When businesses merge, it is often to achieve economies of scale. Larger organizations are typically able to produce goods and services more efficiently and at a lower per-unit cost than smaller businesses because fixed costs are spread out over a larger number of units. This is not always the case, however. Sometimes when two firms merge, being larger will actually create dis-economies of scale, where per unit production costs increase because of increased coordination costs.
• #47: Re-usabiDomain standards Business models Workforce
• #49: Quality Communities need to define disciplinary and data type specific best practices (documentation of provenance, uncertainties, etc.) Readiness for data mining & analysis Improve granularity of access Data fusion (the ‘data lake’)
• #63: There are more lessons to be learned from the IGSN development, but that is for another talk.