Simon Goring was awarded the M. Lee Alison Award for Geoinformatics at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America.
He presented the talk “Supporting Equitable Science with Open and Ethical Data Communities: The Neotoma Paleocology Database”. The talk focused on our successes in delivering FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible) Data through Neotoma (https://neotomadb.org) to a global community of contributors and users, and our efforts to begin to implement CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility and Ethics) Principles with respect to data in Neotoma that has been obtained from land claimed, controlled or ceded by First Nations, Metis and Indigenous peoples. The talk outlined measurable goals towards ethical stewardship of data, and implementation challenges within a global community of users for a data resource that has significant holdings of “legacy” data.
The Outstanding Contributions in Geoinformatics award is made to an individual who has contributed in an outstanding manner to geology through the application of the principles of Geoinformatics. The individual will be a member of GSA. Normally, a single award will be made annually, but in any particular year may be withheld if the management board decides that no suitable candidate has been nominated. The award will be presented at the annual GSA meeting.