World Heat Flow Database Project (WHFD)
Contributions to the community: The project aims to support the process understanding of the Earth’s thermal field by providing authenticated heat flow data. It contributes to FAIR disciplinary data through the creation of a harmonized heat flow data model which is openly available and extended by a new data quality scheme. Moreover, the designed web portal for heat flow data offers community-specific visualisation and analysis functions. This database serves the geoscience community.
Heat flow is a measure of thermal energy flowing from the Earth's core to its surface. Corresponding measurement data has been collected since more than 100 years. However, at the time the World Heat Flow Database Project started the data quality was heterogeneous on both national and international scale and the quality of the data collections was poor. Main reasons have been rudimentary or even missing metadata and data documentation, especially as most data derives from scholarly literature and reports that primarily didn’t aim at providing comprehensive data descriptions and metadata.
The aim of the World Heat Flow Database Project is to develop a new research data infrastructure for the Global Heat Flow Database of the IHFC (International Heat Flow Commission) offering a “one-stop shop” for comprehensive information on heat-flow related data as well as links to publications, projects, and the researchers. This new user-oriented web platform will provide quality-proofed, up-to-date, well-documented, extended, enriched, and restructured heat-flow data to the geoscientific community. The sustainable provision of the platform and its contents will be assured by the GFZ Potsdam. The quality assurance and improvement of the historical heat flow data is done by the parallel Global Heat Flow Data Assessment Project, which is led by IHFC and Task Force VIII of the International Lithosphere Program. The new technical database will take into account the criteria of FAIR and OPEN data policy and will support the interoperability with other geoscientific data services (e.g., EPOS). Core elements are the provision of globally used persistent identifiers: 1. DOI for heat-flow data newly submitted to the database. 2. ORCID IDs to uniquely identify authors. 3. International Generic Sample Numbers (IGSN) for connecting data and literature with physical samples on which data were measured.
Outcomes
This project is supported by the International Heat Flow Commission (IHFC). Models and database are openly available as follows: - The harmonized heat flow data model: [@fuchs2021] - The German Heat Flow Database 2022: [@fuchs2022] - The developed data quality scheme extends the existing reference data model: [@fuchs2023] - A new version of the global heat flow database is released every year: Information about available data can be accessed on the OneStop4All. The data is published in the GFZ Data Services repository, with additional details available here.