Best Practices

An item is a general term for describing platforms, devices or sensors.  Platforms generally carries 1-n devices which in turn may also have their own (sub)devices.

Every item must be assigned to a type.   For example the platform "Polarstern" is an item of type "Vessel" whereas the "TM_Ice_Corer_2 and UAF_TM_Ice_Corer_3" is an item of type "Corer".  

While creating a new item, you need to consider whether it should be tagged to a classical platform type (e.g. Vessel, Station, Vehicle, etc) or not.  When in doubt, please send a support request to o2a-support (at) awi.de or consult directly with a chief editor assigned to your your project.

You will be requested to assign a short name for all items you want to create.   Items are uniquely identified via a local URN  identifier (URN means Uniform Resource Locator) using the item type and individual short name syntax .. Example: vessel:ms_hel:fb_740602 points to the ferrybox on MS Helgoland.   

While creating a short name for your device, keep in mind that the short names cannot be modified once created because they are in-use within INGEST and STORAGE (for setting the path to data files for a particular item).  Be  also aware that you cannnot create items with the same short name under one parent item. 

The "Contact" tab supports different (editor, owner, principal investigator, engineer-in-charge, dship-connector, etc).  Make sure the following contacts have been at least assigned to your item:

1. Editor:  allowed to modify and delete items
2. Owner: describes the institutional affiliation of an item.  If your institute is not listed yes, please contact o2a-support (at) awi.de 

In addition to entering the roles "editor" and "owner" of an item, we advise you to also enter the principal investigator.  This is particular relevant as metadata for our data services (interface which supports direct download of the data stored in INGEST) 

The Contact “polarstern dship” with role “dship connector” must be assigned to all items to be imported in DSHIP during a given campaign.  If in doubt, please send a support request to o2a-support (at) awi.de or consult directly with a chief editor assigned to your your project.

We recommend you to use the autocompletion functionality (simply type the first 3 characters of the station label as listed in PANGAEA's expedition catalogue) to confortably get the metadata fields under "Action" filled out for you and this way avoiding possible typos. The autocompletion functionality for station metaddata is supported for all large and middle-sized german vessels (Polarstern, Sonne, Metero, Alkor, Heincke, Poseidon).

All items which have been in operation on the field get assigned a persistant identifier PID (= items for which editors have assigned an action of type mission, mount, commissioned or deployment ) . The PID consists of a handle which implies that the landing page for all items in SENSOR which have been in use are cite-enabled.

The practice 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

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.