Dr. Angus Nixon1,2, Dr. Bryant Ware2,3, Dr. Yoann Gréau2,4, Dr. Fabian Kohlmann5, Mr. Moritz Theile5, Dr. Wayne Noble5, Prof. Brent McInnes2,3
1Department of Earth Science, School of Physics, Chemistry and Earth Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia, 2AuScope Geochemistry Network, Perth, Australia, 3John de Laeter Centre, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, 4Centre of Excellence CCFS & GEMOC, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 5Lithodat Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Angus completed a PhD in Geology at The University of Adelaide, examining the low-temperature evolution of northern Australia and the relationship between distal tectonic forces and local structural and geochemical heterogeneities. He subsequently joined the AuScope Geochemistry Network (AGN) and worked on projects establishing standards for areas including fission track thermochronology, inorganic geochemistry, and electron microprobe analysis. Angus is currently the AGN project lead for standardising and publishing geochemical vocabularies and schemas between the academic and government sectors, and a member of the OneGeochemistry initiative.
Abstract:
The geochemical community routinely produces large volumes of analytical data from a wide array of techniques, acquisition methods, analytical scales, and sample and research applications. These long-tail datasets are commonly collected and reported through numerous, non-standardised protocols and reporting standards, if indeed standards are applied at all. Furthermore, while some repositories for geochemical data are available, they are not presently interoperable and data within repositories is gathered from published sources, which may be incomplete or unstructured, and hence often lack the information (metadata) required to appropriately describe the data and allow it to be confidently reused. In response to these concerns, the AuScope Geochemistry Network (AGN) has designed reporting standards and technical solutions to capture, normalise, and share geochemical data resources. The AGN has produced a number of best practice data reporting schema and vocabularies for a variety of data types through consultation with expert advisory groups and, where available, following published community recommendations. These have been implemented within the AGN data platform AusGeochem, which has been designed to ingest data immediately following acquisition to promote the capture and retention of all data and supporting metadata. Reporting templates for U/Pb, fission track, (U-Th-Sm)/He, ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar and inorganic geochemistry data, as well as for inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and electron microprobe analytical methodologies have now been established and vocabularies are openly discoverable through the Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA) service. These vocabularies may be used to develop cross-walks for machine-to-machine interoperability with other services, including government geological surveys and international repositories.