EPIC 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.   In case you do need to change a sort name, please contact o2a-support@awi.de 

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. Affiliation: 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 "affiliation" 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).

It is also important to keep in mind that for actions in which a

When inserting an action to an item, users may request the creation of an individual  persistent identifier for the item which automatically allows user to cite the item accordingly (citation syntax included).   The PID (along with the citation) can thus be used in PANGAEA as link to a device/platform used in a particular event.   In the PANGAEA example https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.857507 the PID of type handle generated by SENSOR   hdl:10013/sensor.664525cf-45b9-4969-bb88-91a1c5e97a5b is used to descrobe the payload of an AUV during a specific event/station on board of RV Merian.