News Release

Digitizing earth: developing a cyberinfrastructure for the geosciences

Reports and Proceedings

American Geosciences Institute

Alexandria, VA -- The world is buzzing with the hum of servers containing terabytes of the world's collective datasets. And the geosciences are no different. Geoscientists are awash in data like never before. The challenge now for the geoscience community is how to best integrate disparate datasets for communal use and establish uniform standards for data entry. Now, communities of computer scientists and geoscientists are coming together to tackle the challenge of how best to integrate the wealth of data describing the earth system and to encourage geoscientists to dust off their personal collections for integration into the cumulative data cloud.

EARTH explores the future of geoinformatics and examines how collaborations, such as EarthCube, are starting to advance the conversation. It's an exciting time to be researching and building the cyber underpinnings of the digitized earth.

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Read the complete article on Big Data in the geosciences in the September issue of EARTH Magazine, available online at: http://bit.ly/170cAmy. For the complete issue, including discussion on Earth's innermost secrets, an interview with geoscientist Tanya Atwater, and new high-definition archaeological techniques used to understand obsidian arrowheads, visit the EARTH Magazine Digital Newsstand: http://www.earthmagazine.org/digital.

Keep up to date with the latest happenings in Earth, energy and the environment news with EARTH Magazine online at http://www.earthmagazine.org/. Published by the American Geosciences Institute, EARTH is your source for the science behind the headlines.

The American Geosciences Institute is a nonprofit federation of geoscientific and professional associations that represents more than 250,000 geologists, geophysicists and other earth scientists. Founded in 1948, AGI provides information services to geoscientists, serves as a voice of shared interests in the profession, plays a major role in strengthening geosciences education, and strives to increase public awareness of the vital role geosciences play in society's use of resources, resiliency to natural hazards, and interaction with the environment.


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