Dynamic Data Citation Service—Subset Tool for Operational Data Management

Abstract

In earth observation and climatological sciences, data and their data services grow on a daily basis in a large spatial extent due to the high coverage rate of satellite sensors, model calculations, but also by continuous meteorological in situ observations. In order to reuse such data, especially data fragments as well as their data services in a collaborative and reproducible manner by citing the origin source, data analysts, e.g., researchers or impact modelers, need a possibility to identify the exact version, precise time information, parameter, and names of the dataset used. A manual process would make the citation of data fragments as a subset of an entire dataset rather complex and imprecise to obtain. Data in climate research are in most cases multidimensional, structured grid data that can change partially over time. The citation of such evolving content requires the approach of “dynamic data citation”. The applied approach is based on associating queries with persistent identifiers. These queries contain the subsetting parameters, e.g., the spatial coordinates of the desired study area or the time frame with a start and end date, which are automatically included in the metadata of the newly generated subset and thus represent the information about the data history, the data provenance, which has to be established in data repository ecosystems. The Research Data Alliance Data Citation Working Group (RDA Data Citation WG) summarized the scientific status quo as well as the state of the art from existing citation and data management concepts and developed the scalable dynamic data citation methodology of evolving data. The Data Centre at the Climate Change Centre Austria (CCCA) has implemented the given recommendations and offers since 2017 an operational service on dynamic data citation on climate scenario data. With the consciousness that the objective of this topic brings a lot of dependencies on bibliographic citation research which is still under discussion, the CCCA service on Dynamic Data Citation focused on the climate domain specific issues, like characteristics of data, formats, software environment, and usage behavior. The current effort beyond spreading made experiences will be the scalability of the implementation, e.g., towards the potential of an Open Data Cube solution.

Precisely and Persistently Identifying and Citing Arbitrary Subsets of Dynamic Data

“…The main motivation for setting up a web-based tool for dynamic data citation and its fragments was to have a technical solution to align a persistent identifier with an automatically generated citation text. The core component for the set up within the CCCA environment depicted in Figure 8 (Schubert, Seyerl, & Sack, 2019) is the Handle.NET®Registry Server for PID assignment. For processing and creating data fragments, the Unidata Thredds Data Server (TDS) in combination with NCDF Subset Services (NCSS) is embedded.…”

Future climate projection of heat indices for Austrian major cities: Strengthening urban resilience and meeting user needs

“…A time slider function allows to dive into different time scenarios and automatically creates a graph of the time series from 2011 until 2100 for a single spatial point. In addition, an integrated CCCA subset service (Schubert et al 2019) allows for the creation and persistently republishing of any data fragments, filtered by an "Area of Interest" or a specific time frame. Source code of these functionalities is provided as open source on Github (Github 2008).…”

Earth Observation Open Science: Enhancing Reproducible Science Using Data Cubes

“…Data citation supports (1) attribution and credit; (2) collaboration and reuse of data; (3) enables reproducibility of findings; (4) faster and efficient research progress, and (5) provides means to share data with (future) researchers. Schubert et al [37] presented a solution for an operational service on dynamic data citation to enable the effective reuse of EO data in a collaborative and reproducible manner.…”