Advancing community workflows, interdisciplinary collaboration, communication, and trust in field based geologic data systems

StraboField – part of the StraboSpot digital data system – allows researchers to share primary field data and observations, provide a context for sampling, and plot geological maps. This presentation details recent developments within StraboField to facilitate multi-disciplinary studies and increase trust in digital data system. On the basis of community feedback, we have recently introduced Documents, of which there are three types: Outcrop Summaries, Memos, and Models. All of these Documents are designed to establish trust in the digital data, by establishing why a particular decision was made. Outcrop summaries put uncertainty evaluation in the workflow of a field-based geologist, and allow the researcher to designate a Critical Outcrop. There are four different types of critical outcrops: Exemplar, Confuser, Disambiguator, and Anchor. Further, geologists can report analogous features observed elsewhere in the world that are guiding their interpretation. Memos consist of five types: 1) Idea; 2) Plan; 3) Question; 4) Summary; and 5) Other (User defined). Users can specify an intended audience for each report: Anyone, Collaborators, or Individual scientist. Memos both facilitate collaborative work on the same project and enhance communication between practitioners with different expertise, working on similar projects. Models allow geologists to describe one or multiple models, so that future observations can be tested against these models. Memos and Models enable users to link spots together and to add additional context through notes, photos, sketches, and tags. By including this information in digital data systems, future practitioners working with these datasets will have a clear understanding of how the data were collected and where there may be gaps worth researching. Documents are designed to emphasize and summarize important observations and connections in a field area to aid collaborators or other practitioners. Critically, Documents retain a temporal ordering that records the development of a particular idea or model throughout a field project.