I'm here in Houston at the national meeting of the Geological Society of America where we are launching the Geosciences Information Network - a national distributed interoperable data network for the geosciences. GIN is a partnership of the USGS and the State Geological Surveys, with AZGS taking the lead for the states.
On Saturday we ran a full day workshop to introduce GIN to a wider audience and get feedback on network standards. Sunday we had a technical poster outlining the 3-year implementation plan, and starting last night, we are staffing a booth in the exhibit hall demonstrating components of the network. [right, AZGS Geoinformatics chief Steve Richard, Doug Walker from Univ. KS, and Karin Block from Lamont-Doherty, discuss linking the 600,000+ samples and 12.5 million data points in the EarthChem data network into GIN].