Best Practices

While creating a new item, you need to consider whether it should be tagged to an existing platform type or not. For example, items to be mounted on board of a vessel should be assigned to the corresponding vessel while an item which is deployed manually (e.g. 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 platform (e.g. CTDs in use during the MOSAiC experiment; in this case, because the CTDs are being used in water, on ice or on zodiac and tus makes little sense to assign it to a particular platform). Thus we recommend you to discuss in advance 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.

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)

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.

Every item placed in the live archive in SENSOR (workflow status "public") gets assigned a persistant identifier (PID). The PID consists of a handle which implies that the landing page for all items in SENSOR are cite-enabled.

The practive has shown that the configuration of sub-items associated with an item (e.g., devices/sensors mounted in a given platform) varies with scientific expeditions or even stations. Because of this we allow users to create separate versions of any given platform/device to as to capture the specific sensor configuration during an event (e.g. deployment, calibration). Every version of an item gets an individual PID which is cite-enabled.

Datasets in PANGAEA are often archived for a given event/station. Because individual PIDs are available in SENSOR for selected events, the linking of a dataset archived in PANGAEA to the respective sensor described in SENSOR becomes straightforward. See 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

Certain platforms like moorings are equipped with lots of sensors. Because it often happens that moorings are deployed with similar sensor payload, we support cloning of an item so that automated generation of multiple copies is possible. This greatly faciliates the creation of mooring items.