Best Practices

Creating basic metadata

Before getting started make sure you discuss your particular use case with one of the chief editors listed under SENSOR (for your insittute or project if applied). You should also visit the our YouTube channel (work-in-progress), in particular watch the ones we recommend under SENSOR.

While creating a new item, you need to consider whether it should be tagged to an existing platform type or not. For example, for an item to be mounted on board of a vessel should be assigned to the corresponding vessel while an item which is deployed manually like a drilling instrument is not be assigned to any platform (choose NA). This also holds for items which are used within a project at distinct platforms. CTDs in use during the MOSAiC experiment (campain PS122) is a good example for this scenario. In this case, because the CTDs are being used in water, on ice or on zodiac it makes little sense to assign it to a particular platform.

You will be asked to create a short and long name for your device. Keep in mind that the short names cannot be modified once created because they are in-use by INGEST and STORAGE (for setting the path to data files for a particular item)

Affiliation

Every item is afiiliated (=owned) to a given institute. You need to enter this information under the "Contacts" tab along with the role "owner". In addition to entering the "owner" of an item, you are also requested to enter the name of contact informaiton of PI, engineer-in-charge, data scientist, etc

Ship-mounted and aircraft-mounted sensors

These items represent a special use-case in SENSOR because the metadata is being maintained by a third-partycompany. In case the device you will be using in a given research vessel is not listed yet, please contact sensor (at) awi.de

Bookkeeping deployments of a sensor

In real life devices are being deployed in well-defined actions (e.g. action log from DSHIP) along with fixed payload of sensors. The data from the individual sensors are then stored in repositories like PANGAEA. In order to link the dataset to the information from SENSOR to a given event/action, it is important that you select the action of type deployment (=mount, commisioned). This will trigger the generation of a version of the device (including respective sensors) for the point in time a deployment action was carried out. In the new version you will find a cite-enabled PID (in this case a hnadle) for the instrument along with a recommended citation style. THe PID should be provided during dataset submission. In the PANGAEA example https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.857507 the handle hdl:10013/sensor.664525cf-45b9-4969-bb88-91a1c5e97a5b points to SENSOR metadata specific for action/event

Because calibrations often involve changes in the data output, it is important to also document these as a stand-along action. In particular in this case, we remind you to additionally upload calibration certificates or documents.

Cite-enabled sensors

A persistant identifier (PID) of type handle alog with citation can be created upon demand for actions of type mission, deployment and calibration. is optional but recommended for action types "Deployment" and "Calibration". This allows you to link the item store in SENSOR to the respective dataset stored in PANGAEA. Example: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.857507

If you need to delete a given version/PID, please contact o2a-support (at) awi.de

Cloning items

Realising the platforms like buoys and morrings have similar sensor configurations, we offer a template to create multiple clones of any existing reference item.