Several project members led a workshop with 40 participants, describing the IsoBank project, the goals of the infrastructure, and providing a hands-on tutorial on the ingest process. More workshops are planned in the near future, in conjunction with community conferences and as free-floating (and tuition-free) events. Please e-mail us to indicate your interest in future workshops at isobank@lists.tacc.utexas.edu
Recordings of the training workshop are available via these links:
IsoEcol 2021 IsoBank Training - Part 1
IsoEcol 2021 IsoBank Training - Part 2
The fourth workshop was focused on the implementation of IsoBank as functioning infrastructure, and centered around the existing ingest workflows, documentation of the metadata elements, and optimization of interfaces for search and retrieval of data. In the time period leading up to and following this workshop, IsoBank began accepting deposits from the early user community both for debugging purposes and to begin developing a body of feedback on workflow issues with completing the ingest process.
The third IsoBank workshop, the first to be held virtually, presented an opportunity for the first complete definition of the metadata model, and an opportunity to refine the definition of many data and metadata elements which were critical to the implementation of a data deposit workflow, as well as to search capabilities. The feedback developed at this workshop was critical to the first complete implementation of both data deposit and search and retrieval capabilities for IsoBank.
The second IsoBank workshop was held at the University of New Mexico, and focused on reviewing the first implementation of interactive web infrastructure, and the database schema for isotope data and associated metadata. Significant discussion time was also devoted to refining the understanding of metadata requirements to focus on the elements of importance for access, search, and use of stable isotope data.
This was the first opportunity for all members of the IsoBank subcommittees to meet in person, to understand the goals of the project and to begin committee discussions to fulfill their charges. The primary goals of this meeting were to develop preliminary lists of metadata elements of importance for each of the major disciplinary areas, as well as to develop a shared understanding of the elements of importance in the area of modeling laboratory processing and QAQC procedures. Additional discussions including all workshop participants focused on overall workflow issues for the web-based IsoBank infrastructure, particularly researcher control over data publication, modelling of projects and metadata for use in conjunction with sample processing facilities, and coordination of IsoBank data deposit with sample processing facilities to ensure the maximum possible rate of adoption by the community of stable isotope data users.
The members of the executive committee gathered in Austin at the Texas Advanced Computing Center with the technical implementation team to plan for the overall project and workshop schedule, begin detailing the core database representation of stable isotopes, and develop a common understanding of the projects technical and social goals.
The National Science Foundation funds a three-year effort to build an initial IsoBank implementation, with TACC leading the technical development and co-Principal Investigators from the University of New Mexico, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Utah acting as an executive committee and leading the recruitment of subcommittees for the various disciplinary areas as described in the IsoBank Structure Page.