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Abstract

John (Jack) Williams 1 is a professor in the Department of Geography and former Director of the Center for Climatic research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Jack currently serves as the Chair of the Leadership Council for the Neotoma Paleoecology Database (neotomadb.org). Jack also serves on the Earthrates Steering Committee and, with Mark Uhen and others, is launching the Earth-Life Consortium (earthlifeconsortium.org) as a non-profit organization dedicated to making paleobiological and paleoecological data free and easy to access. Jack's research emphasizes the spatial and temporal responses of plant species and communities to large, novel, and abrupt environmental changes at local to continental scales. This work is indebted to the gathered data and knowledge of decades of palynologists and paleoecologists. Much of his work in recent years has focused on powering the next generation of high-quality macro-scale science by building, supporting, and interlinking open paleodata resources such as the Paleobiology Database, NOAA-Paleoclimatology, and the Neotoma Paleoecology Database. Alicia Newton 2 graduated from the University of South Carolina, where she used foram geochemistry to reconstruct ocean conditions in the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool. She spent 11 years as an editor for Nature Geoscience, where she handled paleoceanography among other topics. She helped to roll out policies on data availability and FAIr data at the journal and aided authors in making their data available at the time of publication. She is currently the Director of Science and Communications at the Geological Society of London, UK.

The Paleoenvironmental Standard Terms (PaST) Thesaurus: Standardizing Heterogeneous Variables in Paleoscience

“…PaST contributes to growing efforts in the paleoscience community to establish data standards that promote findability, interoperability, accessibility, reproducibility and reusability of data sets (e.g., Khider et al, 2019;McKay & Emile-Geay, 2016;Williams, Kaufman, et al, 2018). Variables, in particular, serve as the "currency" between disparate data sets, allowing them to be discovered, reused, and combined (Qin et al, 2014).…”

“…Additionally, there is a need to update records through time as new age and proxy calibrations become available, however this goal can be realized only if one knows adequately what was measured. Lastly, standardizing variable names contributes to building cyberinfrastructure within geosciences, allowing computer applications to accelerate data-intensive science (e.g., Williams, Kaufman, et al, 2018). A recent embodiment of this idea, the FAIR principles emphasize data set findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability, all of which are promoted by controlled terminology (Wilkinson et al, 2016).…”

PaCTS 1.0: A Crowdsourced Reporting Standard for Paleoclimate Data

“…Standardization is critical to many scientific endeavors: efficiently querying databases, analyzing the data and visualizing the results; removing participation barriers for early-careers scientists or people outside the field; reducing unintended errors in data management; and ensuring appropriate credit of the original authors. While the paleoclimate community has made great strides in this direction (e.g., Williams et al, 2018), much work remains. The recent adoption of the FAIR data principles (Wilkinson et al, 2016) by the American Geophysical Union (Stall et al, 2017) elevates the urgency of defining what data and metadata should be archived, and how.…”

Towards increased interoperability of paleoenvironmental observation data

“…The 2018 Past Global Changes Magazine issue (Williams et al 2018) "Building and Harnessing Open Paleodata" touches on all the questions from the production of individual records to the reuse of compilations. Common themes were conventions for reporting, for metadata, and for data structures; crediting mechanisms, community as well as external support in data curation and infrastructure; automating processes; and making data more widely usable.…”