
Writing a data management plan: metadata - laboratory notebooks
Solution:
- Discussed the problem with the post-doc (now left for Canada) – they hadn’t noticed the problem and models essentially had the wrong horizon depths for the shallower surfaces.
- Managed to trace the owners of the original data in the BGS and find out how they processed the data. The original time-based data had been converted to depth-based data, but they used velocities to ensure the deeper parts of the seismic were at the correct depth (the object of BGS research) – this meant that the data was unsuitable for the University of Edinburgh study, which was to investigate the shallower seismic.
In this case, it was relatively easy to apply an additional correction to adjust the Pliocene horizons to the correct well and log depths for the current study.
The moral of the story is – always check where the data came from, who did what to the data, how suitable they are for the current research and if unsuitable, how easy is it to effect a remedy! Also, make sure that you document your own data through the course of your project so that data will be usable without any problems in future.
You have now been introduced to the concept of documentation and metadata.