Service and Archive for Mass Distribution And mass Transport data (SAMDAT)

• Applicants: Dr. Kirsten Elger; Dr. Christoph Förste; Dr.-Ing. Thomas Gruber; Dr. E. Sinem Ince, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Geodesy, Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing, Geoinformatics, Cartography
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 527258067

The International Centre for Global Earth Models (ICGEM) was established in 2004 as a service of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG). Since its establishment, the ICGEM Service has been further developed, hosted, and maintained based on a best effort basis with available work force capacity and technical support at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. The service has been collecting all Global Gravity Field Models (GGMs), which are directly linked to mass distribution and mass transport in system Earth. ICGEM makes the models available to the public in a standardised, self-explanatory format and supports the gravity field community under the umbrella of IAG´s International Gravity Field Service (IGFS). Moreover, ICGEM interacts with other community services such as GGOS (Global Geodetic Observing System) in the establishment of scientific products that are global and responds to user requirements from Earth sciences regarding GGMs and related products. However, with the latest products available, such as (very) high-resolution GGMs, advanced model representations and wide range of interdisciplinary applications in geodesy, geophysics, hydrology, oceanography, glaciology and climatology; the products offered in ICGEM so far are limited with heterogeneous coverage, partial validation and documentation which are mostly designed for geodetic users. Therefore, the current performance of the ICGEM will no longer meet the requirements of the state-of-the-art developments and growing demands by the users. There is an immediate need for scientific and technical expansion, modernisation, and upgrade of the existing database with new and interoperable platforms, research data and metadata included in the service, and its calculation and visualisation components that the scientific community and society have a great interest on. The overall objective of the SAMDAT project is to respond to the growing need and demand for improved and quality assured, well documented GGMs and related products with additional types of datasets and data representations that are enriched with metadata and provided in a sustainable and freely accessible research data infrastructure. General requirements of future needs rely on the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) Principles for research data. The objectives of the upgraded ICGEM Service infrastructure are closely in line with the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) objectives in terms of systematic management of research data, their backup, discovery and accessibility. As being a science driven data service, ICGEM will be rebuilt and integrated with the NFDI4Earth on the national level as well as linking to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) with the aim of serving worldwide users. Such a platform will make the quality assured data and products exchangeable and supports education, science, and society.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)