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Data exchange facilitated

Nature Geoscience volume 4, page 814 (2011)Cite this article

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To the Editor

A recent Commentary1 in Nature Geoscience points out a gap between the principles and actions of data sharing in geoscience, and urges professional support for the archiving of data during its creation. We agree with these points, but we would like to add that attention should also be paid to the interoperability of data. Data should be discoverable, accessible, decodable, understandable and usable, and data sharing should be legal and ethical for all participants2. Without interoperability in this sense, local geoscience data archives will run the risk of becoming separate islands in a data deluge3.

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References

  1. Fleischer, D. & Jannaschk, K. Nature Geosci. 4, 575–576 (2011).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, PO Box 217, Enschede, 7500 AE, The Netherlands

    Xiaogang Ma, Emmanuel John M. Carranza & Freek D. van der Meer

  2. Federal Institute for Geoscience and Natural Resources (BGR), Stilleweg 2, Hannover, 30655, Germany

    Kristine Asch

  3. British Geological Survey, Murchison House, West Main Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3LA, UK

    John L. Laxton

  4. Arizona Geological Survey, 416 W. Congress St, Suite 100, Tucson, 85701, Arizona, USA

    Stephen M. Richard

  5. Geological and Mining Survey of Argentina, Av. Julio A. Roca 651 - p 8 of 1, Buenos Aires, 1322, Argentina

    Carlos G. Asato

  6. School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China

    Chonglong Wu

  7. CSIRO, Earth Science and Resource Engineering, PO Box 1130, Bentley, 6102, Western Australia, Australia

    Guillaume Duclaux

  8. Geological Survey of Japan, AIST Tsukuba Central 7, Tsukuba, 305-8567, Japan

    Koji Wakita

Authors
  1. Xiaogang Ma
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  2. Kristine Asch
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  3. John L. Laxton
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  4. Stephen M. Richard
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  5. Carlos G. Asato
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  6. Emmanuel John M. Carranza
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  7. Freek D. van der Meer
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  8. Chonglong Wu
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  9. Guillaume Duclaux
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  10. Koji Wakita
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Correspondence to Xiaogang Ma.

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Ma, X., Asch, K., Laxton, J. et al. Data exchange facilitated. Nature Geosci 4, 814 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1335

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