In the following, we collect user stories as they might happen in an ideal future, where cross-discipline data discovery and usage are more or less a reality. Some of the following may already be reasonably possible.
Pull requests for additional stories (I guess in README.md will be fine until we have a lot more) or amendments for existing stories are most welcome.
To keep diffs tidy, please try to keep line lengths below 80 (and accept unbalanced lines in the source). If you have rst2pdf installed, you can just run make to create a PDF rendering of this.
Archeologers find an odd correlation in the orientations of gaps in palisade rings of about 3000 BCE shown in ground radar images. They suspect that the structures might have served as calendars or observatories and would like to see what the gaps might have pointed at at different times of the year back at construction time.
They discover a service that lets its users determine (obviously, among many other things), object positions in the horizon system at arbitrary times within several 1e4 years and use that to see what objects were visible in the gaps at dawn and dusk and find that the gaps point towards some speficic bright star at spring and autumn solstice.
Astronomers investigate supernova remnants close to the solar system. To link the time scales of their evolution to Earth time scales, they are interested in finding data of chemical anomalies (e.g., the presence of Fe-60 or overabundances of Ni-60) in Earth sediments.
They discover a set of services giving precise, time-registered abundances in ocean drill cores. Fortunately, all follow an easily discoverable standard, and so they find that about 1.5 million years ago the Earth received a major intake of r-process elements, pointing towards a supernova that exploded reasonably close to Earth in that timeframe.
Going on, they might want to discover a paleontology database to see if any influence of that putative event on speciation can be found.
A chemist does optical spectrography on some (very rarefied) sample. They see a line they've not yet seen and would like to know what could possibly generate it.
They discover line databases from various sciences and eventually finds astronomers have found the same line in planetary nebulae long ago and figured out it is a forbidden line of ionised Silicon.
When calibrating the geologic record using solar system dynamics (cf. a blog post on using Milankovic cycles in astrochronology), geologists will want to locate different long-time simulations of solar system dynamics; and conversely, groups investigating the secular evolution of the solar system could use the geological record to see if their simulations are consistent with the constraints of, say, paleoclimatology.
(Based on a true story) Environmental scientists are interested in the status of the Ozone layer at the beginning of the 20th century. They realise that the telluric lines in spectra of astronomical objects may let them measure Ozone concentration in the higher atmosphere, as long as sufficiently strong Ozone lines are in the spectral overage of the observations. They now discover metadata collections of astronomical plate archives. Ideally, these will be available through standard protocols offering constraints by coverage (so the environmental scientists can filter out the large number of spectra that will probably not overlap the absorption spectrum of ozone) and time, perhaps even on object types (e.g., to select target objects with strong UV emission).