Welcome to the Scientific Data Management Group

PIK’s research depends heavily on the availability and accessability of a large variety of data. Data & Computation's Scientific Data Management (SDM) Group supports the research projects at PIK in handling data and develops tools for accessing PIK data in house and outside the institute.

Scientific data in global change research are highly inhomogeneous and of increasing complexity. Accordingly, the PIK approach to handling data is threefold:

• Central metadata management for in-house use
• Central data management for selected data themes
• Distributed data management organised by scientific working units (project groups and departments)

For central data and metadata management, the SDM Group develops tools and supplies the following services:

• Data models and warehouses
  Central PIK data are stored in the relational database management system Oracle. Data models have been designed to efficiently store and retrieve time series data in / from a data warehouse architecture. Data originating from model output or observations are related to specific geographic locations, to polygonally bounded areas, or to the nodes of regular grids.
  
• Tools / user interfaces
  Access to PIK's database infrastructure is provided via Internet frontends. Tools for browsing, retrieving, processing, and visualisation of geographically related time series data have been developed.
  
• Data visualization
  SDM has developed and supplied methods to explore and evaluate multi-dimensional model output by interactive visualization techniques which provide a deeper insight into heterogeneous, large-volume data.
  
• Metadata management
  SDM has developed with national partners the ISO 19115-compliant CERA2 metadata model and currently applies a subset of it for its metadatabase.
  
• Data Grids / e-Science
  The SDM group contributes to development and application of grid techniques for sharing data, storage and compute resources.
  

Generally, access from outside the institute to acquired data is restricted or forbidden by the data originators. That's why it is impossible to make PIK's data archives on meteorological, hydrological, water quality, phenological, economic, social and other data themes directly available to the scientific community or the general public. Instead contact the Scientific Data Management Group of the Institute. PIK has started to publish its own research results on the Internet. Check here for freely available datasets from PIK.