Interagency Data Stewardship/LifeCycle/Jul2009MeetingPlans

Please contribute your thoughts and suggestions on our upcoming plans for including Cluster Activities at the upcoming summer ESIP meeting (Santa Barbara, July 2009).

Current thinking is that there would be 4 two-hour sessions deliberately spread over two days to allow for discussion and reflection between sessions. At this point it isn't entirely clear whether the results would be summarized as a workshop report though they clearly need to be captured, since they will be needed to support future activities.

The four sessions could be:

• Agencies
  • The session would start with presentations by representatives of each agency (NASA, NOAA, EPA, USGS, Library of Congress, NARA, etc.) who will be asked to describe their agency's policies and procedures in regards to data stewardship/preservation; to discuss their actual practices in particular where they diverge from policy; to assess where the agency is headed and any future plans in this area; and to suggest areas where joint work might be advantageous
  • The intent would be to understand what is happening in other agencies on this topic, to motivate cross-agency coordination, and to determine topics ripe for joint development/work at the working level
• Standards
  • Presentations would be given on the following topics
    • Preservation standards
    • Data formats
    • Metadata formats
    • Provenance
  • The purpose of this session is both standards training and to raise awareness within the community of the standards that exist in the earth science
• Preservation technologies
  • The intent of this session is to determine and begin to assess preservation technologies that exist in the market place (both commercial and open source)
  • There would be presentations on technologies like Fedora, DSpace, DuraSpace, IRods, NCore, etc.
• Non-Earth Science disciplines
  • What are other disciplines doing for preservation/stewardship? Any lessons to be learned and incorporated into earth science practice?
  • Biology, Astronomy, Medicine, etc. are potential disciplines to be covered

Standards Session

Topical outline for discussion at cluster meeting - Santa Barbara, July 2009:

1. OAIS - Have someone knowledgeable about OAIS to explain what it is, how it is being used by NOAA and other agencies. (Why is it important to use it? Is it a mandatory for agencies to use? If so, who made it mandatory?)
2. Data Formats - Discuss what is important in data formats to ensure long term preservation of data – talk about HDF, HDF-EOS and NetCDF in this context. What about agencies other than NASA and NOAA? What formats do they use? How does one ensure that data stored in HDF/HDF-EOS/NetCDF continue to be readable and understandable 50 years from now? Etc.
3. Metadata Formats – treat similarly to 2 considering metadata standards currently in use (ISO standards, North American Profile, CF-1, COARDS, PREMIS).
4. Provenance Standards – have someone knowledgeable discuss state of the art. Should there be a common set of requirements to preserve provenance?

I invite everyone to look at this outline and comment. Also, either volunteers or recommendations for speakers to cover these areas would be most welcome.

Depending on the scheduling for the other topic areas to be covered at the meeting, we may have 1.5 to 2 hours for this area. So, 20-30 minutes for each of the four items in the above outline would be the budget.

Ramapriyan 15:38, 5 March 2009 (EST)