Glossary

Glossary#

ACCESS#: Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) modelling system.
ACCESS-NRI#: (https://www.access-nri.org.au) The Australian Earth-System Simulator (ACCESS-NRI) is a national research Infrastructure created to support development and research with the ACCESS modelling system.
ACS#: Australia Climate Service
AODN#: The Australian Ocean Data Network Portal provides access to all available Australian marine and climate science data and provides the primary access to IMOS data including access to the IMOS metadata.
ARCCSS#: The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science
ARDC#: The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC ex-ANDS) is a NCRIS project aimed to enable the Australian research community and industry access to nationally significant, data intensive digital research infrastructure, platforms, skills and collections of high quality data. ARDC now also manages the NeCTAR infrastructure.
Attribution #: Attribution is the act of recognising the author/s of a piece of work that you used in your research. It is a common requirement of licenses.
AURIN#: The Australian Research Data Commons (AURIN) is an NCRIS project that provides e-research infrastructure and expertise to support urban, regional and social science research in academia, government and industry.
CARE#: The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance are people and purpose-oriented, reflecting the crucial role of data in advancing Indigenous innovation and self-determination. See more
CARE - Collective Benefit#: Data ecosystems shall be designed and function in ways that enable Indigenous Peoples to derive benefit from the data.
CARE - Authority to Control#: Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests in Indigenous data must be recognised and their authority to control such data be empowered.
CARE - Responsibility#: Those working with Indigenous data have a responsibility to share how those data are used to support Indigenous Peoples’ self- determination and collective benefit.
CARE - Ethics#: Indigenous Peoples’ rights and wellbeing should be the primary concern at all stages of the data life cycle and across the data ecosystem.
CC#: Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organisation that produces licenses to encourage sharing of knowledge, commonly used for data products. See also the open access license book page.
CDM#: Common Data Model (CDM) is an abstract data model for scientific datasets. This term can be used in different contexts. Unidata’s Common Data Model merges the netCDF, OPeNDAP, and HDF5 data models to create a common API for many types of scientific data. The NetCDF Java library is an implementation of the CDM which can read many file formats besides netCDF. Another example of CDM is the one developed by Copernicus to provide a uniform description (conventions, structures, formats etc.) of all data and products in their Climate Data Store.
CDS#: Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS) provides access to a wide range of quality-assured climate datasets including observations, historical climate data records, estimates of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) derived from Earth observations, global and regional climate reanalyses of past observations, seasonal forecasts and climate projections. It is an initiative of the European Climate Change Service.
CF conventions#: The CF Climate and Forecast conventions are used to set metadata attributes in netCDF files. See more
Citation#: Citation is the way you attribute a piece of work, it should contain all the information necessary to locate the original work.
CLEX#: The ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes
Copyright#: Copyright is a form of intellectual property meant to protect the right of the author of a creative work to control how the work is used. More comprehensive but readable information on copyright is available here.
COSIMA#: COSIMA is the Consortium for Ocean-Sea Ice Modelling in Australia, which brings together Australian researchers involved in global ocean and sea ice modelling.
DAP#: DAP refers to the Data Access Protocol used by OPeNDAP, it is a data transmission protocol designed specifically for science data. The protocol provides data types to accommodate gridded data, relational data, and time series, regardless of the original format. It is recognised by many scientific softwares, so you can pass a dap url instead of a filename to open a file or a subset.
Data Archiving or Preservation#: The process of putting your data in long term storage following the completion of a project or publication for a minimum of 5 years. This includes identifying who can access the data and how it can be accessed. Many institutions have repositories which can be used by staff and students.
Data Back Up#: The process of saving your data to protect against data loss. This can be an automatic process, where the storage location automatically retains previous versions of your data, or a manual process, where you need to actively save the data in another location. See more
Data Sharing#: Making your data available for use by other researchers for their own research projects. This requires quality metadata to determine data source and changes made to allow for reuse. The best way to share data is to publish it, then it will be more discoverable and will be assigned a persistent identifier (such as DOI) which helps others to cite the data.
Data Storage#: The location and/or system you use to store your data during a research project. This could include disk on personal computers, disk or tape on a shared server, external storage devices such as hard drives or SD cards, and networked drives managed by your institution, commercial or research cloud storage.
DMP#: A Data Management Plan is a tool to help you manage the data for a specific research project. It can take different forms depending on the stage of your project, for example a DMP to submit with a grant application will be different from the DMP required to publish your data. A DMP evolves with your project and is useful to record your data provenance. See more
FAIR#: The guiding principles often used in data governance are the FAIR principles of data sharing – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. An extension to these are the FAIRER principles which add Ethical and Revisable to the acronym. See more
FAIR - Findable#: Data should be easy to find and identify.
FAIR - Accessible#: Data should have open access whenever possible.
FAIR - Interoperable#: Well formatted data that uses discipline conventions and vocabularies, for both the data itself and the metadata used to describe it.
FAIR - Reusable#: Data should be accompanied by enough information on how it was collected or processed, as to guarantee its quality and hence make it usable by others.
FAIRER - Ethical#: Data should be ethical, its collection, distribution, and reuse should be done in a way that is respectful toward humans and the planet.
FAIRER - Revisable#: Data can require fixes or corrections, retraction and republication, or extensions. These potential fixes should be planned for.
File Management#: Methods for storing, organising, naming, discovering and retrieving files in a structured consistent manner.
GeoNetwork#: GeoNetwork is an open source web interface to serve geospatial data across multiple catalogs. NCI uses a GeoNetwork catalogue to manage the metadata of data collections hosted on their servers.
IMOS#: The Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) is an NCRIS project that operates a wide range of observing equipment throughout Australia’s coastal and open oceans, making all of its data accessible to the marine and climate science community, other stakeholders and collaborators, via the AODN portal.
License#: A copyright license is a legal document stating what someone else is allowed or not allowed to do with a research product.
Metadata#: The information on data. Examples are metadata files accompanying observations with details of instrumentations and location, or the attributes of a netCDF file. A metadata record or repositories will contain information on a dataset but not the data itself.
NCI#: The Australian National Computational Infrastructure is a NCRIS project whose aim is to provide high-performance data, storage and computing for all domains of science. It is the main HPC provider for the climate science community.
NCRIS#: The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) provides strategic funding for national-scale research infrastructure in Australia and facilitates strong partnerships between the research sector, business, industry and government to actively support research.
NCSS#: NetCDF Subset Service (NCSS) allows subsetting certain CDM datasets in coordinate space, using a REST API. Gridded data subsets can be returned in CF-compliant netCDF3 or netCDF4. Point data subsets can be returned in CSV, XML, or CF-DSG netCDF files.
Nectar#: The ARDC Nectar Research Cloud (Nectar) is Australia’s national research cloud, specifically designed for research computing.
OGC#: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium whose aim is to create free, publicly available geospatial standards to improve access to geospatial data. Examples are WCS, WMS and WFS services.
Open Access#: A set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of cost or other access barriers.
OPeNDAP#: The Open-source Project for a Network Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP) is the client/server software associated to DAP. OPeNDAP is a widely used, subsetting data access method extending the HTTP protocol. CLEX CMS has published a blog that demonstrates how to build and use an opendap url. Other more in depth information on OPenDAP is available from their website, including a list of software that understand this protocol.
Provenance#: Data provenance describes the journey data goes through. It documents the evolution of a dataset from the original source including all the processes and methodology by which it was produced. See more
Research Data Alliance#: Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a global community-driven initiative with the goal of building the social and technical infrastructure to enable open sharing and re-use of data.
Research Data Australia#: Research Data Australia RDA is the data discovery service of ARDC. Most universities and research centres across Australia are now listing their data collections on RDA. RDA does not hold the data, so it is often used instead to list records existing on other repositories. Universities and data centres often automatically create an RDA record for any newly published dataset. It is a useful tool for data, and more recently, for software discovery. RDA also holds records for research programs, institutions and the researchers themselves. Datasets listed on RDA are automatically added to the google dataset search tool.
TDS#: The THREDDS Data Server (TDS) is a data and metadata catalogue server based on THREDDS.NCI uses a THREDDS server to make datasets available remotely. The CLEX and ARCCSS data collections are also available on this.
TERN#: The Australian Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Infrastructure (TERN) is a NCRIS project that supports research leadership in terrestrial environmental monitoring and modelling for long-term national benefit. TERN publish and deliver terrestrial data via its Data Discovery Portal.
THREDDS#: The [Thematic Real-Time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS)] provides metadata and data access for scientific datasets, using a variety of remote data access protocols, including DAP.
WCS#: Web Coverage Service (WCS) is a protocol used to transfer “coverages”, ie. objects covering a geographical area.
WFS#: Web Feature Service (WFS) is a protocol that offers direct fine-grained access to geographic information at the feature and feature property level.
WMS#: Web Mapping Service (WMS) is a protocol used by map servers to deliver map images.