the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 29 Jul 2026
A community-driven metadata model for describing and integrating Controlled Source Seismic data in multidisciplinary data-driven Earth Sciences
Abstract. Controlled Source Seismic (CSS) data are key to understanding the structure and composition of the lithosphere at different scales. They are highly valuable both in their own right and as input to multidisciplinary studies and Earth system modelling. The challenge for scientists is to find existing data, assess their relevance for a particular purpose, and eventually get access and permission to reuse selected data sets. The European research infrastructure for solid Earth sciences, EPOS (European Plate Observing System) was designed to solve such problems. It is a multidisciplinary, distributed research infrastructure that facilitates the integrated use of data, data products, and facilities from the solid Earth science community. FAIR principles are put into practice, enabling access to data and products from hundreds of scientific data services across Europe.
A community building effort for Controlled Source Seismic data was started at the EGU24 and SEISMIX2024 conferences, with the aim of developing a metadata model for data set discovery, as no existing standards or common practices for describing CSS data sets could be identified. This objective was achieved by early 2026 and the results are presented in this paper, together with a data service as an interface to the EPOS Platform. The metadata model is sufficiently detailed to allow a scientist to decide whether a discovered data set is fit for the intended reuse purpose or not. On the other hand, obligatory attributes are limited to avoid incompatibility with the diverse metadata models of potential data providers.
The EPOS CSS metadata catalogue will meet FAIR and Open Data principles. The data sets registered in the metadata catalogue should ideally also be FAIR and Open. However, enforcing such a policy would exclude a large part of the existing seismic data. Therefore, the metadata model was designed to also describe closed data by providing suitable information on the legal constraints. In this way, the CSS metadata catalogue will be most useful to the scientists by providing the largest coverage while also advertising FAIR data and Open Science to the data providers.
- Preprint
(1431 KB) - Metadata XML
- BibTeX
- EndNote
Status: open (extended)
- RC1: 'Comment on essd-2026-498', Anonymous Referee #1, 11 Nov 2026 reply
Data sets
A metadata model and catalogue for describing and integrating Controlled Source Seismic data Henning Lorenz et al. https://dataservices.gfz-potsdam.de/panmetaworks/review/bfb3fcd76528a4fff5638ed8b995d5e75b057bbccf394254de8374b4cabe4340/
Metadata model and metadata catalogue content Henning Lorenz https://github.com/epos-css/metadata
Viewed
| HTML | XML | Total | BibTeX | EndNote | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 503 | 165 | 189 | 857 | 283 | 245 |
- HTML: 503
- PDF: 165
- XML: 189
- Total: 857
- BibTeX: 283
- EndNote: 245
Viewed (geographical distribution)
| Country | # | Views | % |
|---|
| Total: | 0 |
| HTML: | 0 |
| PDF: | 0 |
| XML: | 0 |
- 1
General Comments
The manuscript presents a community-driven metadata model designed to support the description and discovery of Controlled Source Seismic (CSS) data, with the aim of improving their FAIRness and facilitating their integration into the EPOS infrastructure.
The manuscript is well structured and provides a clear overview of the development process, from community engagement to the development and testing of the metadata model and the implementation of a data discovery service. The authors address the challenges associated with CSS data management, particularly the heterogeneity of datasets and the legal and access restrictions affecting their availability. The adoption of controlled vocabularies and established standards, together with the definition of mandatory and optional metadata attributes, provides a solid basis for improving data discoverability and interoperability. The availability of the model, its documentation, and implementation examples in a public GitHub repository further support its potential reuse.
Overall, this work represents a relevant contribution to the standardization of CSS metadata and may serve as a useful reference for other scientific communities facing similar challenges.
Specific Comments
1. Controlled vocabularies and machine-actionability
The adoption of SKOS-based controlled vocabularies is a valuable aspect of the proposed metadata model. However, while individual concepts are identified by URIs, these URIs do not appear to be dereferenceable (e.g., https://www.geodata.rocks/voc/css/format/SEG-Y). I would recommend ensuring that concept URIs resolve to their corresponding definitions and semantic descriptions, preferably in a machine-readable format such as SKOS/RDF. This would further improve the interoperability and machine-actionability of the model.
2. Access rights
Given the nature of CSS data, particularly the legal and access restrictions affecting industrial datasets, I would suggest introducing an explicit accessRights property in the metadata model. Although the license and legalConstraints properties are already included, they do not necessarily provide a standardized indication of resource accessibility, especially since legalConstraints is represented as free text.
Using an established controlled vocabulary, such as the EU Access Rights Authority Table (https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/authority-tables/-/resource/dataset/access-right), would enable automated systems to distinguish between different access conditions without interpreting free-text descriptions. The authors could also evaluate whether this property should be mandatory.
3. References to EPOS and the EPOS Platform
I suggest including direct links to the official EPOS website (https://www.epos-eu.org/) and the EPOS Platform (https://www.ics-c.epos-eu.org/) when they are first mentioned in the manuscript, in addition to the bibliographic references already provided.