HR: 0830h
AN: GP31B-0757    [PDF]
TI: The Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC)
AU: Johnson, C
EM: cljohnson@ucsd.edu
AF: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, IGPP, La Jolla, CA 92093-0225 United States
AU: Constable, C
EM: cconstable@ucsd.edu
AF: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, IGPP, La Jolla, CA 92093-0225 United States
AU: Tauxe, L
EM: ltauxe@ucsd.edu
AF: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, IGPP, La Jolla, CA 92093-0225 United States
AU: * Koppers, A
EM: akoppers@ucsd.edu
AF: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, IGPP, La Jolla, CA 92093-0225 United States
AU: Banerjee, S
EM: banerjee@umn.edu
AF: Institute for Rock Magnetism, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 United States
AU: Jackson, M
EM: jacks057@tc.umn.edu
AF: Institute for Rock Magnetism, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 United States
AU: Solheid, P
EM: peat@umn.edu
AF: Institute for Rock Magnetism, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 United States
AB: The Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC) is a multi-user facility to establish and maintain a state-of-the-art relational database and digital archive for rock and paleomagnetic data. The goal of MagIC is to make such data generally available and to provide an information technology infrastructure for these and other research-oriented databases run by the international community. As its name implies, MagIC will not be restricted to paleomagnetic or rock magnetic data only, although MagIC will focus on these kinds of information during its setup phase. MagIC will be hosted under EarthRef.org at http://earthref.org/MAGIC/ where two "integrated" web portals will be developed, one for paleomagnetism (currently functional as a prototype that can be explored via the http://earthref.org/databases/PMAG/ link) and one for rock magnetism. The MagIC database will store all measurements and their derived properties for studies of paleomagnetic directions (inclination, declination) and their intensities, and for rock magnetic experiments (hysteresis, remanence, susceptibility, anisotropy). Ultimately, this database will allow researchers to study "on the internet" and to download important data sets that display paleo-secular variations in the intensity of the Earth's magnetic field over geological time, or that display magnetic data in typical Zijderveld, hysteresis/FORC and various magnetization/remanence diagrams. The MagIC database is completely integrated in the EarthRef.org relational database structure and thus benefits significantly from already-existing common database components, such as the EarthRef Reference Database (ERR) and Address Book (ERAB). The ERR allows researchers to find complete sets of literature resources as used in GERM (Geochemical Earth Reference Model), REM (Reference Earth Model) and MagIC. The ERAB contains addresses for all contributors to the EarthRef.org databases, and also for those who participated in data collection, archiving and analysis in the magnetic studies. Integration with these existing components will guarantee direct traceability to the original sources of the MagIC data and metadata. The MagIC database design focuses around the general workflow that results in the determination of typical paleomagnetic and rock magnetic analyses. This ensures that individual data points can be traced between the actual measurements and their associated specimen, sample, site, rock formation and locality. This permits a distinction between original and derived data, where the actual measurements are performed at the specimen level, and data at the sample level and higher are then derived products in the database. These relations will also allow recalculation of derived properties, such as site means, when new data becomes available for a specific locality. Data contribution to the MagIC database is critical in achieving a useful research tool. We have developed a standard data and metadata template that can be used to provide all data at the same time as publication. Software tools are provided to facilitate easy population of these templates. The tools allow for the import/export of data files in a delimited text format, and they provide some advanced functionality to validate data and to check internal coherence of the data in the template. During and after publication these standardized MagIC templates will be stored in the ERR database of EarthRef.org from where they can be downloaded at all times. Finally, the contents of these template files will be automatically parsed into the online relational database.
UR: http://earthref.org/MAGIC/
DE: 1520 Magnetostratigraphy
DE: 1521 Paleointensity
DE: 1540 Rock and mineral magnetism
DE: 1594 Instruments and techniques
DE: 1599 General or miscellaneous
SC: Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism [GP]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting